Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

[alan]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

> On Jan 31 2007 09:58, alan wrote:
> > On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> > > On Jan 30 2007 14:00, Roland Dreier wrote:
> > > > An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
> > > > since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
> > > > fast anyway.
> > >
> > > And ndiswrapper gives fire to just releasing the Windows one :(
> >
> > ndiswrapper is a way to make it work "now" as opposed to "correct".
> > There is a lot that you cannot do with ndiswrapper that a proper driver
> > can.
>
> The fear is that a vendor might not open things because it works
> "reasonably enough" (for them as well as the enduser) at "this time".
> E.g. I got sis162u.inf for some usb wireless adapter, it works
> enough, but of course I am not too happy with the binary blob because
> it might have some not-so-"correct" core that could silently oops me
> away.

Of course, the vendors need to realize that such problems will be blamed 
on the hardware and not on the drivers.  "But I was using the Windows 
drivers!"

--
"Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing."
                  - University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/