Lone Programmer Writes 352 Webcam Drivers For Linux

mrneutron2004 writes "A French physician and ardent Linux supporter is the one man you can all thank for adding support for 352 webcams in Linux. The Open Source OS world may still be a bit of a mess when competing with the ease of Windows, but efforts like this make you wonder. One man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do. And none of the major Linux distributions back this guy's efforts, even the big players dipping into the corporate world's coffers."

Comments

I hate this..

[.Chndru]

The man wrote 350+ drivers. How about some link love for him, slashdot? http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html

Not 352 seperate drivers

[rminsk]

The programmer did not write 352 seperate drivers for web cams, he wrote drivers for 8 different camera bridge chips and different versions of those chipss.

Re:WOW!!!!

[doti]

While I still value his work, it's worth noticing that the /. title is a lot misleading. He didn't made 253 different drivers, but one driver that works on 253 different webcams that have a lot in common.
From TFA:

FC: So how did the ice ball grow to reach today's 253+ webcams supported with several different chipsets?
MX: Starting with the Sunplus chipset support, I realised that most code in the core driver could be "shareable" to support several webcam chipset(s). That is why the "GSPCA" drivers now support over 250 webcams from different chipset vendors.

Physicist, not physician

[thib_gc]

The article and the summary say that this guy is a physician, but he isn't. He's a physicist. The French word for physicist is physicien. Apparently someone got their words mixed up (but that's okay because they also appear to have their digits mixed up anyway).

to bad it's not in mainline kernel

[the Hewster]

I have to applaud this person for the huge work he has done to support all these webcams under Linux. However, from what I could tell from a quick google search, he seems to be one of these developpers who write GPL drivers for Linux (also GPL) but then refuse to have them included in the mainline kernel for some mystical reason.
This situation really makes me sad because thousands, perhaps millions of people could have their webcam "just work" out of the box, but instead, they have to do all sorts of voodoo magic (look on google, find the package, compile it, patch source etc.). Statistically, a percentage of these people will spend a lot of time getting it to work, some people will fail to make it work and some won't even bother. What a waste.
The worst part of it is that the driver, being GPL, could be included legally without the autor's consent however, this would risk alienating this valuable developper. Imagine if the people developping drivers for motherboard chipsets had the same attitude and what that would do to the usability of Linux.
So please, Michel Xhaard, do a huge favor to the whole Free software comunity at little or no cost to yourself and get that driver in mainline.

Re:Donation Link??

[AchiIIe]

You only need an email address (or phone number) to send paypal money. And here you go: mxhaard@magic.fr

Paypal link: Send money - Enter email or phone

-- Note: It's on his website as well: http://mxhaard.free.fr/apropos.html