maybe this development will spur an open device driver standard, or adoption of wrappers for the unified BSD driver standard into other frameworks
On Friday 15 December 2006 17:37, David Nicol wrote:
I hope not, a standard for drivers just introduces a grey-area for permitting binary drivers. Linux is just now finally starting the process to get rid of them: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/13/342
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Linus shot that down. http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/13/370
On 12/16/06, Christopher A. Bier chris.bier@cymor.com wrote:
And a damned good thing he did, too. For the forseeable future, there are going to be hardware manufacturers who don't have the budget to do driver development for Linux in a 'cleanroom', separated from their Windows driver work. The tools that Microsoft provides to companies for building drivers come with proprietary MS stuff in them, and attached NDAs that forbid them releasing the source to anyone who hasn't also signed the NDA.
And they have the gall to call the GPL 'viral'.
Anyway, those companies simply are not going to release source code. They'll either not support Linux at all, or do it in userspace like Linus said. Either way, preventing binary drivers would be a feel-good, do-nothing act.
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Christopher A. Bier -
David Nicol -
Luke -Jr -
Monty J. Harder