atc 

Today, Linux Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman blogged with an offer to hardware manufacturers:

“[T]he Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development… All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while. If your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device’s specifications, we have arranged a program with OSDL/TLF’s Tech Board to provide the legal framework where a company can interact with a member of the kernel community in order to properly assure that all needed NDA requirements are fulfilled.”

I found this quite a suprise, but moreso, an interesting proposal. The issue with Linux & hardware at current, is that the manufacturers refuse to release specifications on their products. This means developers have to ‘reverse engineer’ the way the component works in order to develop a working module for the Linux kernel. Whilst it would be much more ideal that the manufacturers release the specifications, manufacturers won’t do this – they risk their competitors learning possible priceless information about how the product works, and in turn, amend their product to counter this functionality. More intriguingly though, is that if they were to release code, it could highlight possible patent infringents, or cause lawsuits due to parts of their intellectual property suggesting that the manufacturer stole code.

Perhaps somewhat overlooked, is the issue of Non Disclosure Agreements mentioned in the above quote. Could this mean that if a company were to use the ‘program’ that Greg has talked about, that the resulting code be forced out of a GPL license due to it being intellectual property? This could further hinder the FOSS aim of a completely open Linux (you might also want to read about the Banning Of Non-GPL Modules in 2008) and its modules. This is purely speculation though, IANAL.
Either way, I very much hope the manufacturers take this offer up and work closely with the Linux development community to provide a rich and reliable solution to hardware detection.

I’ve uploaded some pictures to the picture directory that I captured with my Nikon Coolpix P3, feel free to take a look.

(Oh, and this site is now on average result 23 when searching for ‘placid’ on Google – getting there!)