Message-ID: <41E1E57A.7060902@comcast.net>
Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2005 21:16:26 -0500
From: John Richard Moser <nigelenki@comcast.net>
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To: Dave Airlie <airlied@gmail.com>
CC: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>, znmeb@cesmail.net,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: starting with 2.7
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Dave Airlie wrote:
|>And what 3rd party hardware vendor wants to waste their resources by
|>repeting smaller versions of the one-time cost of driver writing over
|>and over to accomodate linux, when they can't even accomodate all
|>versions due to special patches some people have?  So far there's been a
|>rediculous but visible trend of hardware vendors to hold their source
|>closed.
|
|
| I do wonder would open source kernel drivers to work with a closed
| source user space application be accepted into the mainline kernel...
| say for example Nvidia or VMware GPL'ed their lower layer kernel
| interfaces but kept their userspace (X driver and VMware) closed
| source which is perfectly acceptable from a license point of view..
| would Linus/Andrew accept the nvidia lowlevel into the kernel, if not
| then it would be idealogical not licensing issues which would make the
| argument for having a stable module interface better :-)
|
| It would be interesting to find out .. and you are right there is
| little point in arguing this at this stage, closed source drivers are
| evil.
|

I believe closed source drivers are an acceptable evil for two cases:

- - We do not have an open source alteranive yet, and so we need one to
use while that's being developed
- - The hardware is obscure and nobody cares enough to write a driver anyway

open source drivers are better becaus I can just recompile them for new
hardware.  Get a PPC?  Have a USB cam?  Rebuild the kernel for PPC with
OSS drivers.  Can't do that with binaries.  Can't security audit the
source code of binaries either.  :)

| Dave.
|

- --
All content of all messages exchanged herein are left in the
Public Domain, unless otherwise explicitly stated.

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