Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 14th Sep 2012 22:30 UTC
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Member since:
2007-02-17
Wow. Just, wow.
"We Linux devs have finally managed to go far enough in market share that hardware vendors will care about us. Now that we are here, we don't care for the younger OSs that are struggling just like we did before anymore, and will gladly sign NDAs on specs so as to keep an edge on them" "
The Linux driver project is over five years old. Why didn't you make this complaint back in April 2007?
http://lwn.net/Articles/276973/
"So the LDP was born. It started out as a single place for hardware manufacturers to contact in order to get drivers written for their devices for free. We allowed the ability for companies to sign an NDA if needed to help get over the hurdle that some companies have in releasing their specifications. The NDA process was put into place through the Linux Foundation, and is a 3-way NDA with all of the proper legal documents needed."
The Linux Driver Project would rather not sign an NDA, they would much prefer that companies published programming specifications. However, if a given company insists that an NDA is necessary or there will be no co-operation, then having to sign an NDA over the programming specifications is a small price to pay.
After all, the end product is source code under the GPL. Everyone is free to study that code and determine how it works. Anyone is able even to re-distribute that code, as long as they agree to re-distribute it to others under the same license as they received it. Where is there a problem?
If there is some problem with keeping the GPL driver code open, other parties may still study that GPL code, determine how it works, write a new driver of their own from the knowledge thereby gained, and redistribute their own code under whatever license they please.