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Message-ID: <3d57814d0702010103m4d7c3577q35b7f5fff16a716a@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 19:03:22 +1000
From: "Trent Waddington" <trent.waddington@gmail.com>
To: "Nicolas Mailhot" <nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net>
Subject: Re: Free Linux Driver Development!
Cc: "Greg KH" <greg@kroah.com>, "Theodore Tso" <tytso@mit.edu>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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On 2/1/07, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net> wrote:
> 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...

It is rude, but they're writing proprietary modules, and *that* is
rude, so screw 'em.

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

Greg didn't say it was rude to write a new driver without consulting
the author of an existing driver.. just that taking their code without
asking them if they would prefer to put it in the tree themselves is a
bit rude.

Admittably there is a point where this whole politeness thing could
get out of hand, but I think a good rule of thumb is to ask the author
if they're ok with you doing X with their code, and if they say no,
well, try to be gracious about it.  Not that they *should* say no,
this *is* free software after all.

Trent
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