Kernel Maintainer Kills Philips USB Camera Support

outanowhere writes "The author of the Philips webcams kernel module has thrown in the towel and quit providing the pwc and pwcx kernel modules which make using Philips-based USB cameras such as those from Logitech and Philips possible with Linux. According to the author, the last straw was when a kernel maintainer changed his pwc module to make using the binary-only pwcx compression module impossible. It is a victory for obsessive kernel-purists but a major loss for all Linux users."

Comments

Re:By the way

[Teogue]

As a developer for a very small company, trying to get our Open Source driver into the 2.4 kernel was a nightmare.

For several reasons, user land was not a viable option. The elitist control freak running the show wouldn't let our code in. Consequently, we lost some good free advertising, and possibly some customers in order to feed the ego of some guy bent on denying anything he thought could go through user land instead.

We ended up just putting the source on our web site. Several customers already use it very successfully. But none the less, we were blocked from contributing while trying to uphold the spirit and ideals of OSS. I can only imagine how much the poor sap from Philips was being jerked around.

That being said, Linux was a stroll through a grassy meadow compared to trying to go through WHQL testing for M$.