Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 16th Feb 2007 21:38 UTC, submitted by deanna
Greg Kroah-Hartman's announcement for free Linux driver development included the necesssary legal framework to honor NDAs when creating GPL'd drivers. This allowance was discussed on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list. In a public exchange with Greg KH, Stephan Rickauer said: "Now these companies have a great excuse to keep specs locked up tight under NDA, while pretending to be 'open'. The OpenBSD project has made clear more than once how this will hurt Free Software in the long run. Signing NDA's ensures that Linux gets a working driver, sure, but the internals are indistinguishable from magic. It is a source code version of a blob." OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt called the free driver effort a farce, "you are trying to make sure that maintainers of code - i.e. any random joe who wants to improve the code in the future - has less access to docs later on because someone signed an NDA to write it in the first place. You are making a very big mistake."
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Member since:
2006-03-12
If I walk into your house and start smoking, do you comment on it? Do you ask me to stop? Demand it? Do you stop me physically?
If you do nothing, say nothing, then you support me smoking in your house, if you join me for a butt, then obviously you support my smoking in your home.
If you do not oppose something, you accept it. If you work with it, support it even, then you accept it. If you like it does not come into play, you've accepted it.
Signing an NDA does not make someone the permanent developer of a driver resultant from that NDA's acceptance, instead it makes them the progenator of it. That developer can die, get bored and stop working on it, or just dissappear into the mist. There is nothing obligating the person to maintain the code after it's creation.
If something is against your principles and you do it anyways, do you then not have that principle anymore?
Stop with the closed-source trolling, BSD supports the existance of closed source software, it holds nothing against it. However, OpenBSD does not support closed-source drivers, in fact, they are one of the only operating systems that flatly refuses them these days.
So, skipping the troll next time, how do you reconcile selling one's beliefs out in order to support those very beliefs?