"'A downside of this is that an enormous mass of third-party drivers that haven???t passed through Microsoft???s approval process can???t be used under 64-bit Vista, and because of the time and money involved in the approval process may never end up running under Vista.'
If you own a hardware company you are completely at Microsoft???s mercy, and if they decide not to approve your drivers, or just delay their approval, you???ll starve to death."
I in no way defend the rest of the paper, but this isn't how I read this point. Personally, I feel I should be able to load any third-party drivers without requiring the author to shell out a few hundred bucks for a certificate, especially if the authors don't have many resources. For example, there's a driver that is part of a freeware program for overclocking my video card (RivaTuner). I'm currently tweaking my new computer, I don't like the fact that I have to restart and disable the requirement every time I want to load that driver again. This artificial restriction makes me angry every time I forget upon restart, and one of these advanced-tweaking applications crashes because it couldn't load its driver.
There's a way to get around this problem if the authors get lucky - RivaTuner used some different site's certificate. But Rivatuner is pretty much one guy's freeware project, not some for-profit company. This guy shouldn't be asked to pay hundreds of dollars to sign his driver - there has to be a better way.
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