On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 10:30:01AM -0500, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
The point is that you do have a choice, and you should exercise that choice by supporting hardware that is supported by and that supports "FOSS".
No, the point is that choice often isn't that black-and-white.
When, in the limit, choice does reduce to the simple case you outline, where the only consideration is which wireless device to buy, I agree with you: One should support that kind of hardware.
But oftentimes hardware purchase decisions are an aggregation of several other factors which are weighed against each other, and purchase of non-supported hardware happens as a byproduct--consider the wide variety of non-supported or poorly-supported winmodems that are bundled, without option, on laptops these days, almost without much choice.
We buy those, perhaps, in spite of the modems in them. I'd be fain to reject a laptop that had a non-supported winmodem, which I would probably little use even were it supported, if every other feature of the system were perfectly aligned with my preferences, including support for/from free software.
Or, sometimes, the purchase is a fait accompli, and the only challenge (for instance, in an installfest scenario) is, given the hardware, get as much free software running on it as possible.
So, in that light, the availability of ndiswrappers, though not ideologically pristine, can be a net gain for freedom.