The open source community offers to helps hardware companies
The Linux kernel team is offering to write hardware drivers for any hardware company that gives them a spec or at least access to an engineer that can answer questions. This is big news! Kernel drivers have been a hot topic for a long time with issues that range from proprietary drivers (is that legal with a GPL kernel or not?) to just not having a driver that worked. Anyone who's tried to get wireless working on their Linux laptop has probably run into this problem. Often the drivers are written by users who really need the driver because they want to use the device on Linux but they don't have access to the hardware spec.
The Linux kernel team has decided to take matters into their own hands and they've put out an offer to write the kernel driver for any hardware device for any company! All they are asing for is a hardware spec or at the very least access to a hardware engineer. If there are nondisclosure issues, the Linux Foundation has offered to help work them out.
So why haven't hardware companies written Linux kernel drivers already? It's probably a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to:
- not wanting to open source their specification – some even worry that the open source driver will give away their company secrets
- worrying that if they release a proprietary driver they might have to open source it later – if they release a proprietary driver now and those are declared by the courts to be illegal, they'll have to remove it from the market it or open source it and then they are back to the first point
- not having enough resources to get to Linux if it's a lower priority than other operating systems for their target market
So while I don't expect this to create a mad rush of hardware vendors lining up for free kernel development work, I do hope it encourages them to accept this generous offer of free development effort and to expand their markets to Linux!
