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    SubjectRe: 2.3.51 tulip broken
    Date
    In article <38D21310.5CA52278@kalifornia.com>,
    David Ford <david@kalifornia.com> wrote:
    >
    >Please explain how his code development is closed source? This is totally BS
    >and you know it. All the code is available, all the list discussion is
    >available, and patches and requests are accepted all the time.

    David, pipe down.

    You seem to like the approach Donald has taken. But take it from me, it
    DOES NOT WORK.

    The problem is that maintaining the drivers in their own small universe
    means that only those people who follow the driver development will ever
    even test them. Which means that people for whom the old drivers are
    broken are basically the only ones testing the new drivers - and when a
    new driver is finally integrated into the base kernel it won't work for
    a lot of people that had a perfectly working driver in the old version.

    And don't even bother telling me it doesn't happen. It happened to _me_
    more than once. I decided that I should try to fetch Donalds latest and
    greatest _despite_ the fact that he hadn't even bothered to send it to
    me or to Alan, and it simply didn't work on the very basic hardware that
    I had.

    I fixed the tulip driver at least twice to work with the media
    detection, and sent Donald email about what I had done and why (why:
    without those fixes it would notever get a link on the machine that I
    used). I don't know if my fixes ever actually made it into Donalds
    version, because after the second time I just stopped bothering trying
    to re-fix the same thing, and I never updated his driver again.

    In contrast, what Jeff and others have done have been of the type where
    immediately when a fix is made, it is released. Which means that if
    there are problems with it, people who follow new kernel releases will
    know. Immediately. Not in a few months time when the next "driver
    release" happens.

    This is what Jeff means with "closed source". Yes, the sources are
    there. Yes, they get released every once in a while. But Donald
    doesn't let people _participate_. He thinks he is the only one who
    should actually touch the driver, and then he gets very upset when
    things change and others fix up "his" drivers to take into account the
    fact that the interfaces changed.

    I accept patches from anybody. I accept patches from people other than
    Jeff. If somebody sends me a bugfix for a driver, and it is so obvious
    that even I can tell that it must be better than the current code, I
    will apply it. Obviously, in many cases I cannot make a good judgement
    (because I don't know the hardware or other issues well enough), and
    that is when having a maintainer is important.

    If anybody thinks that being the maintainer equals being in 100%
    control, then I don't think they have understood the TRUE meaning of
    Open Source. Open source is about letting go of complete control. Accept
    the fact that other people are wonderful resources to fixing problems,
    and let them help you.

    It's about accepting the fact that open source means that interfaces
    will change. Not whining about it. And when somebody else steps forward
    that does a better job of maintaining a driver, accept it gracefully.

    Linus

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