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
Funny, the OpenBSD people seem to see a different, "big picture," is yours bigger then, than the one I see?
Noone representing OpenBSD has ever, ever said they want a company to make drivers for them, they've said they want the documentation to do it themselves. So to get a driver in OpenBSD, it costs the amount of money it takes to host the documentation in digital form. I think if a company is making hardware, it probably has a web-budget, most do these days.
What Greg is doing is saying that that documentation isn't needed, that it's more important to simply have magic doing the work. That is so short sighted, it's not even looking at a pixel in the big picture I see.
And that article is a pile of horseshit, complete garbage.