Hi there came across this petition for better printer driver support.

http://www.petitiononline.com/YALB1975/petition.html

I don't know how much good the petition will do, but if LQ members signed it it might make the petition more impressive.

J

Yes. I signed it. I have recently written an article regarding hardware support in Linux. You can read it in my blog.

Regards.

It seems to me that a petition -- or an open letter published (for example) on LQ -- might be a good idea if its well written. Keeping in mind the cliche "You will gather more bees with honey than with vinegar" is just the start of crafting something that is well written. What follows are ideas that I would expect to find in a well written, professional document (petition or letter). I'm posting them because the referenced letter is anything but professional and lacks any persuasive content, IMO.

Persuasive comment can include (among other things) the names of vendors that have recently changed their policy. If I recall the history about nVidia correctly, nVidia didn't support LInux at all but eventually came out with driver(s), albeit as binary files. IBM's decision to move a number of their patents into the Open Source community might also be persuasive. At the very least, making mention of the work being done on SourceForge seems like a good idea, to me. Some might say omitting a reference to SourceForge -- all the help that can be made available to assist driver development -- is even a little shortsighted.

A company too small to compete with HP (as an example of one company that has made great strides in printer driver development through SourceForge) may not have much to gain. And this is the bottom line. For a company to undertake a task that has a clear cost to it but does not have a clear return, they may need help figuring out the latter.

Petitions related to Linux and Open Source
Adobe and Macromedia for Linux Petition
The Linux Printer Driver Petition
Get Yahoo! to support Firefox Petition
Free drivers Petition
Petition Against Software Patents
Shockwave Player and Plugin for Linux Petition
The Linux Gaming Petition
Freedom of Emulation Petition

man craig, you always seem to pick up a good list of links. Well done!

I would like to see (ok, it's a whim) a "craig's links" page- of course you'd have to maintain it which would suck for you if you didn't want to do it- the page would be searchable- for example- you would search "petition" and you would get those links.
I suppose it's been done before as google- but "craig's links" would be specific.

I like petitions, but I know some people find them annoying. Any thoughts?

titanium_geek