Subject: Re: Free Linux Driver Development!
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel
Date: 2007-01-30 22:14:44 GMT (2 years, 22 weeks, 1 day, 15 hours and 45 minutes ago)
> > There was a wireless-mini-summit a week or so ago, so those developers > > all know what is going on in that space right now. They are facing a > > number of different regulatory issues, combined with lack of > > specifications from some vendors. I don't think that the developers who > > actually have specs are complaining about anything right now. > > OK, one last reply before I give up on this thread... > > Sure, Ralink drivers will get upstream eventually. But by the time > the drivers get merged, Ralink will have stopped making the chips that > it supports (or so I read, http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/wireless/)! > I don't think that taking a year or two to merge a driver is going to > impress a vendor, especially since the reverse-engineered Broadcom > wireless driver is probably going to go upstream at just about the > same time. > > 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. I'm sort of with Roland on this, the timelines aren't usually worth it for a company to bother especially with complicated hardware, the time taken to do a community graphics driver for any GPU where specs have been available approaches infinity, unless the vendor actually does the driver or pays someone to do the driver the hope of a community supported driver reaching maturity while the product is still available is slim.... for anyone desparate to start writing device drivers, XGI have recently dropped a load of specs for their cards, I'm not seeing anyone other than the usual GPU ppl step up an do anything and as I said the time it takes a single volunteer to write a GPU driver is a lot longer than the card... Dave.