From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932157AbXAaBbX (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:31:23 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932248AbXAaBbX (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:31:23 -0500 Received: from mail.suse.de ([195.135.220.2]:52924 "EHLO mx1.suse.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932157AbXAaBbW (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:31:22 -0500 Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:30:24 -0800 From: Greg KH To: Roland Dreier Cc: Jeff Garzik , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Free Linux Driver Development! Message-ID: <20070131013024.GC31759@kroah.com> References: <20070130191020.GF20642@kroah.com> <20070130195445.GE22022@kroah.com> <45BFC7F2.7090209@garzik.org> <45BFD03F.4020003@garzik.org> <45BFDFE7.3000101@garzik.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 05:07:57PM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote: > > > To me, it's clear that historically the community hasn't delivered on > > > > How is that clear? As noted in the specific examples I provided, that > > is how a large number of popular drivers and subsystems have been > > developed. > > Yes, I agree that it often works. What I'm arguing is that it doesn't > ALWAYS work. And Greg is promising (in effect, on my behalf) that "If > you give us specs, then we WILL have drivers." As I've said several > times, I'm all for encouraging vendors to open specs. The only thing > I don't like is marketing open specs by making promises that we may > not be able to keep. I really think we can keep these promises. A number of us have been doing just that for many years now, and I don't see any reason why we would stop doing that now. I would _love_ to be inundated with specs, so many that we run out of developers to work on the devices. But I really don't see that happening any time soon, as there's not that many devices that Linux doesn't already support. And if such a situation does happen, perhaps I will be able to convince some distro companies to pony up the development man-power to help us from going back on our promise... I know quite a few companies would love to help out just a "problem" as it is in their best interest to have Linux support as many devices as possible. So please, don't be so down on the offer, you don't have to do any work if you don't want to :) thanks, greg k-h