Ask Linux users what they find most annoying about Linux, and many will complain about device drivers. While the vast majority of PC components and peripherals work with Linux, some don't work at all, and others are marginal. A leading Linux kernel developer has come up with a solution. In a recent blog and e-mail posting, kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote, "The Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to do." That's a significant point. While many hardware vendors don't want to open up their devices' APIs (application programming interfaces) and ABIs (application binary interfaces) to the open-source community, it's often not because they have any real secret ingredient.
View: The full story
News source: eWeek
View: The full story News source: eWeek
hehe
Good idea, hope some companies take it up.
lol, forgot your irony tags there tD
swoosh...
I'm pretty sure he was just being ironic...
/edit - beaten to the punch.
Nevermind. -_- That's a losing battle on the internet, I suppose.
contracts and and that doesn't help **** when you are still the opwer and the one who ar eutlimately responsible for yoru product, and it's not like you can trust someone elses servers and developers the way you can your own, and theft of these thigns will very quickly lead to pirate developement of hacked driers andf all kinds of things.
so I doubt many of the bigger more serius ones will pick up this offer. too many risks and such
Companies with any sense to not implicitly trust their employees any more than they would a hacker off the street. That's why NDAs already exist for those employees: if someone leaks any of the trade secrets, they get sued into penury and whoever received the info is heavily sanctioned against using it.
The exact same terms of employment would be applicable to these jobbing hackers, just with the more conventional employer-employee terms (like obviously pay and, I imagine, aggressive productivity targets) left out.
Now of course another term of contract often forced on devs is the undertaking not to defect to a competing company. I wonder how well the unpaid hackers would take to that: "After you've done your thing on our driver, you can't go and do it for companies X, Y or Z..." That bit sounds like a turn-off for many, much moreso than the NDA.
??? This doesn't particularly apply to "bigger more serius" (sic) hardware manufacturers. Most of these already have in-house Linux device driver development. This applies to organizations that don't already have the resources. Plus, NDA's apply to volunteer labor just like they do for paid vendors. No difference.
Imagine having to provide support for a new OS. How much would that be, compared to
the sales this would generate.
It isn't asking companies to write and support Linux drivers, at all.
It is the Linux kernel developers saying "we will write your drivers for you". The companies won't need to offer any more support than they do now (which is, well... nada).
The Linux kernel people will write in the drivers, so they are the ones taking on support for making it work as kernels update, or fixing bugs.
No corporate "support" is needed.
What type of devices are they discussing?
They said "some don't work at all" in the article. Someone care to explain?
wifi http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_alles.php?
Other hit-or-miss types of hardware.
wifi http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_alles.php?
Other hit-or-miss types of hardware.
Indeed. Some scanners have a hard time with Sane. And a loooot of wifi cards need ndiswrapper which isn't really a solution to the problem
I think nailing down hardware support is what they need to really crack down on so hopefully this will help make Linux even better.
Why is Apple more reliable? Only specific hardware coded for so easier to locate and fix bugs.
Why is Linux lagging behind a bit? Lack of coded drivers.
So what is the best distro of Linux so far? I want to play games btw.
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I think this week offer won't work better than before. I understand HW companies' concern about having to invent and tune all the binary information their device will have to exchange with the PC, then to lend all this work to a tier, who may forward it to their concurrent (an NDA is a weak barrier for a *hacker*).
Remember when W95 came, with, right on the CD, modern 32-bit virtual drivers already written for 95% of the devices on the market that year, and with its WDM (Windows Driver Model), making easier for HW manufacturers to write more drivers for newer devices. Sure a huge improvement, yet still not enough as we know; and Linux remains still far behind that; offerring to write drivers is a good step, but not enough - and IMO won't work anyway.
What Linux needs first is an LDM (Linux Driver Model), carefully thought and designed with hard work and hard drive from an abundant team of devoted guys, then widely hyped so everyone knows it exists (or it remains useless); this way, HW makers can write just one driver for each device, without bothering about 30 distros, 2 CPU families, etc.
Versailles, Sat 3 Feb 2007 01:21:40 +0100
Last edited by Michel Merlin on 03 Feb 2007 - 07:52
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