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Novell Makes Linux Driver Project a Reality
apokryphos writes "Novell have relaunched the Linux Driver Project by dedicating well-known kernel developer Greg KH to work on the project full-time. Greg KH writes:
'My employer, Novell, has modified my position to now allow me to work full time on this project. Namely getting more new Linux kernel drivers written, for free, for any company that so desires. And to help manage all of the developers and project managers who want to help out...They really care about helping make Linux support as many devices as possible, with fully open-source drivers.'"
Here is an example of a for profit company giving something back. Novell may not be on everyone's favorite list, but there are plenty of companies that actually see the potential for profit by doing things that are helpful. I was personally annoyed at how 9/10 posts in the TomTom thread were simply "they make more money by not being good citizens" posts, and yet those posters intentionally ignored how doing good things can lead to a stronger bottom line, even if the path is not as direct, by building community interest. Anyway, I'm going to make it a point to shun penny wise and pound foolish companies here on out. Start flaming.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Quit the FUDing. There is nothing and never has been anything remotely suggesting that Novell was out to hurt linux or F/OSS itself.
The entire microsoft patent thing was blown out or portion by both microsoft and the FSF. MS did it to ruffly some feathers and attempt to control large companies not wanting to install the unpopular and somewhat failing Vista OS and the FSF did their part in helping microsoft scare people away from Free and open source product in order to push an unpopular GPL license onto the masses. Novell was caught up in the middle of a time when it should have been ripe for everyone to use Linux instead of the new MS Vista OS but instead, self serving asses made a demon out of Novell and scared away most chances of picking up converts who though the switch and massive retraining efforts to switch to Vista might be better served with going to something free and open. Your trolling does nothing for anyone who has been paying attention.
I bet employees of Novell will read your post and shake their heads.. maybe mutter the word "Slashdot" with an explicative prefixed.
/. against anything even remotely affiliated with Microsoft is pathetic and reflects very poorly on the people of the free/open software community. Although I expect most of the complainers have never actually written a line of open source code.
And they would be right. The enormous and irrational bias on
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
> But this is what your management has done to your brand. Congratulations.
No, it's what those few very-vocal poisonous people in the OSS community have done. Instead of praising one of the biggest contributors to open-source-software ever (and probably the biggest company in the world contributing to the Linux desktop), they spread FUD around.
I don't like MS more than the next guy, but if people didn't have such an incredible irrational hatred towards anything with the word "MS", and think that anything involving money necessitates some sort of "selling out" (when reality indicates the contrary), they'd see it's more than possible to have a good deal with a bad company, that it happens in business all the time, and that this is a perfect example of it.
Novell effectively admitted fault that the entire Linux community had infringed on patents, and if you hadn't signed a deal, you could be in trouble. I'd argue that severely hurt Linux and the F/OSS community.
However one action does not fully define a company. Novell has done a great deal to support Linux, but there is no taking away the patent fiasco.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
As much as I applaud the driver initiative by GregKH, this development approach is flawed, because a handful of developers has neither the throughput nor the expertise needed to write high-quality drivers for the great many devices of vastly different kinds that are released every day. The people who made a device know its ins and outs better than a kernel developer, because that's what they specialize in; they can squeeze more performance out of it. Therefore, drivers should be developed by the manufacturer of the device in consultation with kernel developers, not vice versa.
Still, even this kind of collaboration on the manufacturers' part is better than pretending that Linux doesn't exist at all.
Does any one see the connection?
Novell Makes Linux Driver Project a Reality?
AMD Releases Register Specs For R5xx And R6xx?
Does this mean that the "Novell have released a first alpha quality Open Source drivers"
will go to beta, and then GM?
The combination of these two ideas, only two days apart.
I would *LOVE* to see 2D acceleration on my X1300 in Linux.
That would be so cool!
> where is the list touting the manufacturers that stepped forward and provided documentation
... ie. free advertising. They rub our backs, we rub theirs.
That's an excellent idea. A simple wiki page would suffice, providing links to each manufacturer, their open docs page, and their sources page, if any. Use a wiki so that people can add their own entries, and so that the admin can revert abuse easily.
As the list grows, people would start looking there before buying equipment, and to not be listed on it would become a problem for manufacturers by giving their competitors a boost. Don't list manufacturers who don't offer this, as listing them in red might get their lawyers agitated. Omitting them is enough.
Oh, and provide links below it to one or two products produced by each of these friendly manufacturers
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Of course there is plenty potential for profit by doing things that are helpful. But you are comparing apples and oranges. Novell is helping Linux development for free, because Linux actually also is a Novell product that helps them sell a lot of other stuff in their "natural home market". TomTom sells to end-users, most of whom couldn't care less about Linux. Hell, TomTom developers could even he actively belping Linux kernel development, without it impacting the company's sales (I've seen this happen in my own company). I personally always refuse to buy computer-related goodies that do not work with Linux, but you need to look at it from the company's point of view: suporting Linux users will inevitably cost them something and if that is not compensated by extra income, be it from sales or goodwill, it makes perfect business sense for them not to do it. That's irrespective of how much us zealots would want things to be done differently.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Also make sure they disclose documentation so that _all_ free OSes can have free drivers, not just linux.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
Exceot that once you have released a driver under GPL v2, then anyone can hack it to remove the DRM check. Tivo-isation is about how the hardware behaves, not the software.
Pardon? you do realise that EVERYONE infringes on EVERYONE elses patents. Almost every damn thing immaginable has been patented. Hell, I'd be surprised if this very post code hasn't been patented by some twit running a nameless patent harvesting company in some hick state.
Simply signing a patent agreement with Microsoft is no more an admission on Novells part than on Microsofts part regarding who is infridging what - and shock bloody horror, it might mean a working silverlight implementation on *NIX.
If you hate Silverlight - whats the alternative? the Linux hating outfit called Adobe who refuses to give Linux desktop the time of day - both in their crap support for Flash, their refusal to either work with wine to improve product support or port their applications to *NIX. The only thing left is JavaFX which is highly unlikely to take off given Sun's rank reputation for producing cruddy IDE's that make developing for their platform as painful as being kicked in the balls with steel cap boots.
Your question is akin to asking "why buy insurance?".
Neither company has perfect information, and they can make a lot of money out of acting as if there were significant risk, and then doing all of this legal ballet to mitigate the risk.
It's a belief system. And if your faith is insufficient to make the subjective leap, quaff the kool aid, take the magic pill, then you can join the rest of us in the crowd that find the whole thing just a tad bit whiffy. It's either a marketing campaign or a cookbook, my friend.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
"this is marriage for convenience and unfortunately business are like this."
Microsoft's track record of "working with other companies" isn't very good.
but if people didn't have such an incredible irrational hatred towards anything with the word "MS"
I agree that there is a lot of hatred for MS here, but you make it sound like MS did not earn some of it.
Calling Linux a virus, calling people who support linux communists, funding SCO, lobbying politicos in Boston - they've done their share to earn this hatred.
I agree with the basic idea in the modem analogy, but IMHO the problem with these modems is that they're tied to Windows. Openly specced softmodems do exist, I think they're fine. For one thing, they help save manufacturing resources. On the other hand, graphics cards are justified to have dedicated processors, and even with powerful CPUs there would be interconnect bottlenecks.
Sound cards don't seem to have these problems of CPU-intensive work or transfer bottlenecks. Plus, there are so many ways of processing sounds that there's little point in a specialiced DSP for a few of them.
Somehow I like having dedicated hardware, but when you look at the whole objectively, the advantages are not so obvious. For example driver issues, when you have all kinds of weird data going to the soundcard, rather than just raw PCM sound.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Even those companies who don't like MS understand that switching will take time. While in Novell I had such talks with CIOs of big companies many times and learned that doing business with open source it is not an easy task. Understand this: CEOs and CIOs don't only consider technical merits when selecting technologiesm they must also consider other aspects. Thery are not ignorants, just are business men and are acountable for what they decide. Sometime I would like them to take more risks, but unfortunatelly few reach such high positions taking changes and are very conservative.
Not me! The problem is that in this case a single size does NOT fit all! There's a need for at least three and likely five "environments" on the desktop. Here's how I figure.
The first two are the "big two". Fairly heavyweight, the problem here is that the approaches differ and "never the twain shall meet." Then there's XFCE, lighter weight while still being rather featureful, and for the really "resource challenged" (read as <384MB memory "LiveCD", <256MB memory running of of writable media, these days, or 92MB/64MB if you wish to be really conservative), something line IceWM. Finally, some find ION type WMs more to their liking. For them, the standard WM/environments simply aren't organized or efficient enough, and can never work.
Focusing again on the "big two", the problem is as follows. The GNOME approach (characterized from the opposing viewpoint, and obviously drastically simplifying) seems to be that in most cases there is "one single best UI choice", and that if there's a split as to which way is best, it's simply because the "correct" UI presentation hasn't yet been found. Their approach to customization is minimalistic, the less setting there are to confuse the user, the better. The common complaint from the "control freak" (me) and/or "power user" and/or "developer" (Linus) is that tools and choices that should be there, tweaks that should be possible, simply aren't... at least from the GUI... and this they/we find EXTREMELY frustrating!
The perfect example is the UI elements color chooser applet. Even MS has one, yet GNOME for years somehow didn't find it necessary. I'm not talking about just a color chooser applet, sure they had that, but one couldn't use it to do something as simple as choosing the background and text color of a command button, without choosing an entire theme and changing all sorts of unrelated stuff at the same time! I'm not sure if they ever got one or not (at least in GNOME-core, I must assume someone has implemented an option applet to do it), but from my viewpoint, that's so basic a required functionality that I can't consider a desktop environment even half developed without it! Of course, in KDE, it's the colors control panel applet, control panel, right where one would expect it, shipped in kdebase, again, right where one would expect it. It has existed since at least KDE 2.x.
Contrast the "if you don't find our imposed choice best you obviously don't know what's good for you" approach of GNOME with the KDE approach, which could be characterized (hopefully even handedly simplifying/exaggerating) as "if there's a choice in UI behavior, program all possible choices and expose them as an option for the user to choose." The common complaint from the "I just want it to work" crowd is that all those options are confusing and just get in the way of actually getting things done. They find this confusing and frustrating too, I suppose in equal measure to the power users and etc trying to work with GNOME.
The problem is that in terms of basic UI approaches, as I said, "never the twain shall meet." Sure, there can be some working together to make an app from one desktop work well on and function somewhat like the other if it finds itself in that environment, and there are projects to that end. However, I've come to realize that the two approaches are both necessary and fill a need, and that if either desktop project were to suddenly collapse, the developers on the other would likely be first in line donating to get a new one started! Why? Simply this. As long as the folks taking the other approach have their own sandbox to play in, they won't be trying to change the rules in and screw up ours! I'd hate to have GNOME users and devs trying to "simplify" KDE to their liking, removing all the tweaking ability many KD
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
That was my initial reaction, but then I poked around on the project wiki and noticed that they were specifically trying to get GPLv2 licensed drivers. Then I remembered that Greg K-H was one of the developers who tried to fuck up the release of GPLv3 and the bits all clicked into place. This is Novell trying to ensure that they have a supply of GPLv2 drivers available so that they can continue their filthy pact with Microsoft which will be finished if most people release their work as GPLv3.
It's more sinister than that.
Microsoft has designed a tollbooth on general Linux usage without naming even a single patent. Novell's agreement with them set the precedent for acknowledging MS vague claims and actually implementing the tollbooth.
It is MS' insurance policy against Windows being pushed aside on the desktop by Linux; they will still get the revenue stream, even if they don't deserve a penny. When Windows sales really start flagging, just watch them start dragging Ubuntu distributors into court.
Novell should not be trusted, even if only for inept greed.
Linux hardware support will never achieve that semblance of near-perfect support that Windows has. That, in addition to the fact that Linux driver availability is already rather good.
I think it would be much more benefit to the community just maintaining an HCL people can use while they're shopping for hardware. That there is no such easily accessible list available tell me there is something wrong with the way Linux development relates to average PC users.