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Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 09:40:12 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Re: Free Linux Driver Development!
From: "Nicolas Mailhot" <nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net>
To: "Greg KH" <greg@kroah.com>
Cc: "Theodore Tso" <tytso@mit.edu>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Le Jeu 1 février 2007 00:44, Greg KH a écrit :
> On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 06:00:15PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:

>> More specifically, Dave said that it "seemed rude" to just take the
>> driver and send updates, but maybe the best way of dealing with
>> out-of-tree drivers like lirc is to treat the out-of-tree drivers as a
>> kind of spec release, and just have someone in the community forcibly
>> take the code, fix it up, and then get it merged.  Maybe it's being
>> "rude", but so is not responding to requests to get it merged.
>
> No, I'm going by Linus's rule here, if a person doesn't want their code
> in the kernel tree, then I'm not going to forcefully put it there.
> That's just being rude.

Well, reengineering nvidia/ati DRM is rude to ati/nvidia, so was creating
tigon3, so was rewriting from scratch the GPL drivers some ATA vendors
published in the past, so was spurning the SATA/SAS stack adaptec
offered...

Does politeness extend to accepting some devices will never see in-tree
drivers because someone wrote a GPL out-of-tree driver first (and refuses
to push it)? People are more squeamish about using an out-of-tree driver
as reference instead of leaked specs or rev-engeneered windows drivers
(despite out-of-tree drivers being under the GPL ie with authorisation do
do whatever people want with the code).

If the answer is no, then there is a big pile of device documentation (in
the form of source code) waiting to be used.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

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