I don't think so. There are serious license impediments.
See below.
Also, I doubt that UDI will be as nice a driver interface
as Linux-native. That makes in unlikely that UDI drivers
will be developed in large numbers by people primarily
targeting Linux.
> The converse is also equally valid... that the Linux
> community will benefit by "commercially" developed UDI drivers.
That may happen. Linus has stated that his interpretation of
the GPL is that non-GPL driver modules (not compiled-in drivers)
are allowed. GPLled UDI drivers would be even less trouble.
> ...
Unfortunately, you don't seem to understand the GPL. That
is quite critical in this situation.
> I'm not enough of a lawyer to fully respond. My impression is that if
> someone releases a UDI driver under GPL that any OS vendor can
> redistribute that driver as part of their OS
Yes, but they won't want to. See below for why.
> although they are (a) not allowed to charge for that driver
A popular misconception. You can charge what you want for
GPL software. But you can't prevent people from undercutting
you by reselling it.
> (b) must make the source for that driver available to their
> customers upon demand,
Unfortunately for the commercial OS developers, the
combination of the driver and the OS is regarded as a
derived work. That means that if they distribute the
GPL driver with the OS, the OS is also under the GPL,
i.e. they have to release source code and allow people to
use the OS royalty-free. I don't think most OS vendors
would be willing to do that.
There is some controversy about how to interpret the
derived work clause of the GPL, but you will find my
interpretation is shared by almost all the Linux community.
Anyone disagreeing should expect a test case and some
very bad publicity at the least. Be Inc. recently ran
into this and backed down rather than fight it out.
There is a solution: The authors of a GPL driver could
agree to rerelease it under different license, for example
the X11R3 license. But all authors must agree, and many
Linux drivers have several authors. I can't see this
happening on a large scale unless someone is actually
paying the driver writers.
Note that from the point of view of most Linux contributors
this is not an unfortunate consequence of the GPL, it's
part of the reason we write Linux stuff in the first place.
We like it that way. People who disagree can release
under two licenses, as Larry Wall (perl) does.
Perhaps you should be talking more with the Free/Open/NetBSD
people. Their license is much more flexible in this regard.
By the way, I really don't want to start a license flame war
here. I am not saying that any license is better or worse
than any other. People are free to choose the license they
like for the software they release. It's just that X-like
licenses are more suitable for Mr. Quick's purposes (tight
integration into non-open-source OSs).
-- Erik Corry erik@arbat.com Ceterum censeo, Microsoftem esse delendam!- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/