Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

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 > There was a wireless-mini-summit a week or so ago, so those developers
 > all know what is going on in that space right now.  They are facing a
 > number of different regulatory issues, combined with lack of
 > specifications from some vendors.  I don't think that the developers who
 > actually have specs are complaining about anything right now.

OK, one last reply before I give up on this thread...

Sure, Ralink drivers will get upstream eventually.  But by the time
the drivers get merged, Ralink will have stopped making the chips that
it supports (or so I read, http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/wireless/)!
I don't think that taking a year or two to merge a driver is going to
impress a vendor, especially since the reverse-engineered Broadcom
wireless driver is probably going to go upstream at just about the
same time.

An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
fast anyway.

I'm sort of with Roland on this, the timelines aren't usually worth it
for a company to bother especially with complicated hardware, the time
taken to do a community graphics driver for any GPU where specs have
been available approaches infinity, unless the vendor actually does
the driver or pays someone to do the driver the hope of a community
supported driver reaching maturity while the product is still
available is slim.... for anyone desparate to start writing device
drivers, XGI have recently dropped a load of specs for their cards,
I'm not seeing anyone other than the usual GPU ppl step up an do
anything and as I said the time it takes a single volunteer to write a
GPU driver is a lot longer than the card...

Dave.
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