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Linux Bait-and-Switch and Removal of Hardware Support
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It's FOSS ☛ AMD Pulls a Bait-and-Switch on Linux Users with Vivado Licensing Changes
Tells Linux users to either pay up or get stuck on an aging, unsupported version forever.
Big tech companies have a habit of offering something for free, watching the user base grow, and then quietly walking it back once people are too invested to leave easily. A bait-and-switch, so to speak.
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XDA ☛ Linux 7.2 is cutting support for a 35-year-old card's driver because people aren't using it anymore
In an ideal world, Linux would support every piece of tech ever released, for all eternity. There's just one problem: people have to maintain that code, and there's the very real chance that nobody is actually benefiting from it. The result is a lot of manpower spent ensuring that a piece of legacy hardware continues to work with Linux, with zero guarantee that anyone actually uses it.
As such, we'll occasionally see legacy hardware support dropped from the kernel, and it's fascinating to see what kind of tech Linux did support until someone decided to end it. Such is the case with the RC Systems DoubleTalk PC ISA speech synthesizer card driver, a piece of tech released in 1991 that is being retired in Linux 7.2. The best part is, it doesn't even spell doom for anyone who still uses one of these cards.