Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Fri, 27 Aug 2004 02:48:09 -0700 | | From | Craig Milo Rogers <> | | Subject | Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc) |
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On 04.08.27, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 05:03:42PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Of course if some new maintainer shows up and decides to infer how the > > device worked by looking at the original open-source code, that's also > > clearly fine. > > > > I don't want people to play lawyer. Honoring peoples rights to the code > > they write is more important than just the law. > > Umm, just because he's piised off we shouldn't removed support for hardware. > it's not like the driver suddenly stops from working because it's unmaintained.
Bit rot does occur in unmaintained Linux kernel drivers; I believe I've seen it happen. More immediately, though, is that the driver suddenly stops working (in effect) for new users who can no acquire a copy of the proprietary codec module, pwcx. Without pcwx, my brand new Logitech Web cameras are likely to be seriously crippled. I didn't get a copy of pcwx before the website that distributed it shut off access.
I'm seriously considering offering Nemosoft money for a licence for pwcx. Of course, I'd need seperate copies for x86 and x86_64 architectures... Economic rationality rears its ugly head: the overhead costs might be too high.
Craig Milo Rogers - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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