Re: no driver change for 2.4?

Karsten Keil (kkeil@suse.de)
Sun, 8 Aug 1999 11:39:29 +0200

On Sat, Aug 07, 1999 at 10:56:47AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 7 Aug 1999, Rik van Riel wrote:
> >
> > Unfortunately, the phone companies don't allow you to connect to
> > the network with uncertified hardware/driver combo's. Opening up
> > the ISDN development could bring all sorts of legal trouble with
> > it :(
>
> Not really true.
>
> It's true in Germany, not in many other places. Germany is one of the few
> countries in the world who still have a rather strong monopoly on phones,
> although it finally seems to be crumbling there too, as even the Germans
> are growing tired of bad service and exorbitant fees ;)
>
Sorry to correct you in this field.
This law is is a international contract between all telco's.
Without signing it, a telco is not allowed to have international
trafic. And this contract say's that all devices, which are able to
send signaling info's have to be compilant to ITU specs.
This is true nearly worldwide, but the supervision of this vary a lot in
the different countries.
In German too, here is no real supervision, but if a company use equipment
without approval, it may be their get a law suit from one of their
competitors.
> And even in Germany, it's only true of drivers that do everything in
> software: most modern ISDN cards have the actual connection smarts in
> firmware and do not need the same certification (well, they do, but not on

Wrong, the development goes in the other direction, make all in software,
because it's cheaper and the CPU's have enought power to handle it.
Also newer external ISDN devices with serial (standard or USB) are
quit simple and have no D-channel stack on it. Most USB ISDN TA simple map
register access to USB frames.
> the OS driver side: now it's a hardware certification issue). So only a
> rather small subset of the ISDN code is actually affected by these rules,
> and its' fairly easy to say something like "for these cards, it is illegal
> to connect the machine to the phone line if this part of the code has been
> changed".
>
Agree, and this is done so.
> I think it's basically just one or two drivers, and a subset of the driver
> at that.
>
> And quite frankly, let the people vote with their feet. Civil disobedience
> is not always a bad thing, as shown by people like Gandhi. Bringing down
> bad phone monopolies may not ever count as highly as getting the British
> Empire out of India, but let people decide on their own whether they
> should just bend over and take bad rules.

But I think, that some basically rules are necessary for a worldwide
operating net.

>
> SuSE may as a company decide that it cannot legally ship untested drivers,
> for example. They probably don't want to open themselves up to being sued
> by Deutche Telekom or whatever it is called. But even Germans are
> individuals - all the folklore to the contrary notwithstanding, and should
> be allowed to make their own informed judgement.
>

But again, how I said before too:
Your are right, the ISDN development according kernel development gone the
wrong way in the past and I and all other I4L developers like to change it
now.

Karsten

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