Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 1 Feb 2007 19:03:22 +1000 | From | "Trent Waddington" <> | Subject | Re: Free Linux Driver Development! |
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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.
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