Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 09 Jan 2005 21:16:26 -0500 | From | John Richard Moser <> | 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. |
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