I don’t know if you were joking or not… But in case you weren’t: the Intel guys typically have information about upcoming / unreleased products before the details are out in the open. Yes, the drivers can be maintained by the community when the information is available… But, day one driver support won’t be there (since they are generally developed in-house by Intel, and then pushed up to the kernel for release), and community development would (likely) take significantly longer…
And on the Enterprise customer side, there might be some hesitation about adopting newer Intel products that don’t have drivers officially supported by the company…at least in environments where Linux would be the (logical) choice… That might lead Enterprises to look at Windows instead of Linux.
wdym layoffs? intel people who maintain the drivers got fired? why can’t contributors just maintain it?
I don’t know if you were joking or not… But in case you weren’t: the Intel guys typically have information about upcoming / unreleased products before the details are out in the open. Yes, the drivers can be maintained by the community when the information is available… But, day one driver support won’t be there (since they are generally developed in-house by Intel, and then pushed up to the kernel for release), and community development would (likely) take significantly longer…
And on the Enterprise customer side, there might be some hesitation about adopting newer Intel products that don’t have drivers officially supported by the company…at least in environments where Linux would be the (logical) choice… That might lead Enterprises to look at Windows instead of Linux.
Who do you think the contributors are?
Companies pay people to work on Linux. That’s not to say that there aren’t any volunteer contributors but most of the work is paid.