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Linux Kernel Devs Offer Free Driver Development
schwaang writes "Linux Kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman, author of Linux Kernel in a Nutshell has posted an epic announcement on his blog. This could portend increased device compatibility for Linux users, higher-quality drivers, and fewer non-free binary blobs." From the announcement: "[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... in order to properly assure that all needed NDA requirements are fulfilled. Now your developers will have more time to work on drivers for all of the other operating systems out there, and you can add 'supported on Linux' to your product's marketing material."
A really quick scan of the price of windows driver development, demonstrates how much actual value this is for business. Now all you would need to do is pay someone to extend the drivers to other platforms! Eureka!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Is this realistic though? Are companies actually going to take this offer up? If they do, the impact could be awesome (hardware compatibility that could rival Windows and/or Mac OSX)...
Nice one!
ilovegeorgebush
No, those drivers would most likely be written by the community anyways.
To me it seems more like an initiative to figure out which companies use "we don't have the staff/resources for an open driver" to keep their drivers proprietary.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
This way they get drivers written for them for free, and don't need to provide any tech support for the device to those users who purchase it for linux.
I'd say that's pretty much the state of play for the majority of Linux drivers anyway. To be fair I have no way to back up that claim, but it feels that way to me.
My guess is most printer drivers are community developed. Also Modems, and Network adapters, Hard Disks and older video adapters, and Removable Mass Storage devices. The only big 'playas' doing anything in the LDD world are AMD, NVidia, HP and, I guess, Intel. Those contributions are nothing compared to their Windows effort.
This leaves scores of small manf. who hopefully will be interested enough in gaining that additional 5% market share to cooperate.
Where do I sign up as a developer?
I have never written drivers so I may be way out in left field here, but how close are we to being able to specify a standard driver model, with compatibility across operating systems? It seems to me that drivers are one of the biggest impediments to OS adoption. They are also a huge cost center for device manufacturers. Imagine if 99.9% of the driver code could be the same across platforms. Is this even remotely possible? Or perhaps the Linux Kernel driver developers could figure out a way to adapt Windows drivers to run, perhaps in an interpreted or emulated fashion, on Linux (ala Virtual PC). Just a thought.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Other than the public announcement, how is this any different from the way things already work?
The community already writes free drivers for vendors who provide specs and (even better in some cases) loan some hardware.
There are already situations where Linux devs have been able to work out NDA-acceptable solutions.
Really, all the announcement is saying is, "Look, we do this. We've been doing this for years. Just letting you know how things work over here."
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I would disagree. Linux drivers are not made since they do not generate profit, largely due to the small user base verses the cost of developing the driver. If there is but a modest cost of a dev answering a few questions, it may be worth their while if it means shipping another 200 widgets.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
Ranked in order of preference:
a) no driver for your hardware
b) binary blob kernel patch created by hardware munfacturuers
c) binary blob in kernel tree created under NDA by the kernel team (who have private access to the source)
d) obfuscated code in the kernel tree (with original kept private to those kernel devs that have signed the NDA)
e) uncommented code in the kernel tree (with commented code kept private to those kernel devs that have signed the NDA)
f) fully open source driver
Personally I'll accept anything b or above - I'd prefer d or above, would settles for c but would really like f!!
I wonder where the compromises will be made? How far will kernel devs go? How far will companies go?
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
The arguments about out of the box driver support for linux happen all the time. The reality is that the issue is not out of the box support. I often have more functionality out of the box with a modern linux distro than windows on the same hardware but that only gets me so far. The biggest hurdle is supporting less common hardware. Adding driver support in the kernel is great, but there is no way they can keep pace with the release of new obscure hardware. We need a way to support less common hardware without constantly trying to bundle drivers into the kernel. Also the kernel developers are not always willing to merge 3rd party code into the kernel if it isn't to their standards or is perhaps not 100% complete. I completely understand this process, but it doesn't help people who have to search out these drivers and try to compile them from source.
The best example I have is my webcam. I know that when I purchased it it would have linux support because i did my research, but I still had to know how to do the research, how to track down the right driver and then how to build it from source. What we need is a driver manager that operates similarly to or in conjunction with our package managers. If during install or after a first boot I was told that a driver for my webcam was not installed as part of the distro it could then either download a driver package if one is available or it could at least suggest a link to download a driver not yet being packaged for my distro. Having to check my dmesg to see if my webcam shows up as a generic USB device or if a driver has been assigned to it is a terrible solution, we need a more friendly means of checking a supported devices database and better way to get access to the drivers that support our less common hardware. This is especially important for people who don't hand pick their hardware and are less familiar with exact model numbers or sometimes know even less.
This system that manages drivers might also do well to phone home to the distro maintainer when possible to catalog all of the hardware that is not being supported by a driver. That way we can at least get a better idea of where the biggest holes in device support are.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
The key driver (pardon the pun) will not be how many extra widgets they sell but the the strategic importance to most companies of reducing reliance upon Microsoft's hegemony. If you are a widget developer, you do not want to be in the position of most, dancing to the unrestricted tune of Microsoft. You need some collective force to help push back on Microsoft when necessary, or to demonstrate the worth of new ideas which Microsoft may not have picked up on. Having a competitor to Microsoft (even quite a small one) is a massively powerful force in this.
You'll need a big cluebat to get a lot of these companies to wise up. The real reason that they don't give out programming interface information is because they're listening to a lot of IP Lawyers that tell them they have to keep everything secret or it might affect future patentability of future devices (YES, I've seen that A LOT lately, doing Linux driver consulting for some of the crowd willing to do proprietary driver work...), etc.
It's a mixture of worries about revealing possible Patent infringements, trying to slavishly follow the lawyer's advice, and a confusion as to what business they are precisely in (Software versus hardware- a lot of companies, because of the advice of their IP lawyers are confused as to what they should be doing...).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Exactly! I think Greg made a tongue-in-cheek post on his blog and the submitter and /. editor unwittingly took it at face value (no big surprise there). It will be wonderful/funny if some corporate shills also take the blog post at face value and actually start feeding the kernel developers the information they need.
"Am I missing something, I don't see your point?"
Apparently not. What PP said was that there is the potential for profit there, but the hardware industry may be underestimating the buying power of the Linux desktop market.
For example, I, and many other Linux users buy my WiFi based on what works in Linux. I am not a Linux-only human; I have a Mac, a Windell at work, and a Ubuntu laptop.
But therein lay the point: The commercial OS developers already support your product; you wrote drivers for them. Now, at no extra cost, you can have the edge up on your competition for that 1.6% of the computer-using market that has Linux in one form or another. As of 2004, that's 1.6% of 61.8% of all people in the US, or about two-and-a-half million people. At median income of $30k, and assuming that 5% of their purchases are technology-oriented, that's a chunk of $3.75B you're fighting for.
Not a small number, and the slice of it you get could mean the difference between shelling out a new product in a month or shelling it out in a year. Meanwhile, if you can expand that slice at low (rather than building a monolithic driver, build drivers as modules that can be 'plugged in' to existing kernel scaffolding for Linux, Apple/Mach and NT) or no (having the Linux Devs build it) cost, there's no reason you shouldn't.
Of course, the bigger the company, the less this matters to them; large companies have the opportunity to 'rest on their laurels', as it were, when it comes to new accessibility.
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I've decided that HP pisses me off. They go out of their way to make sure you're not refilling ink carts (and in some cases toner) and frankly I don't think their printers are all that. Not to mention that they've all but done away with duplex modules, now you have to buy duplex printers. So if you bought a non-duplex printer and you need duplex, now you have to buy a whole fucking printer! I want a company that gives me choice, not a company that scares me into buying the full-featured product by not offering me a way to add the functionality later. And they're straight up lying if they claim that no one buys those things. Anecdotally, I've got a Laserjet 5550n behind me and to the left for which we would buy a duplex module if it were offered. Since it is not, I have to do it manually, and since I'm lazy, that makes me a sad panda. :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"