linux-kernel - Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

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Date:	Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:30:24 -0800
From:	Greg KH <greg@...ah.com>
To:	Roland Dreier <rdreier@...co.com>
Cc:	Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 05:07:57PM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote:
>  > > To me, it's clear that historically the community hasn't delivered on
>  > 
>  > How is that clear?  As noted in the specific examples I provided, that
>  > is how a large number of popular drivers and subsystems have been
>  > developed.
> 
> Yes, I agree that it often works.  What I'm arguing is that it doesn't
> ALWAYS work.  And Greg is promising (in effect, on my behalf) that "If
> you give us specs, then we WILL have drivers."  As I've said several
> times, I'm all for encouraging vendors to open specs.  The only thing
> I don't like is marketing open specs by making promises that we may
> not be able to keep.

I really think we can keep these promises.  A number of us have been
doing just that for many years now, and I don't see any reason why we
would stop doing that now.

I would _love_ to be inundated with specs, so many that we run out of
developers to work on the devices.  But I really don't see that
happening any time soon, as there's not that many devices that Linux
doesn't already support.

And if such a situation does happen, perhaps I will be able to convince
some distro companies to pony up the development man-power to help us
from going back on our promise...  I know quite a few companies would
love to help out just a "problem" as it is in their best interest to
have Linux support as many devices as possible.

So please, don't be so down on the offer, you don't have to do any work
if you don't want to :)

thanks,

greg k-h
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