Linux loses the Phillips webcam driver
Posted Aug 31, 2004 7:36 UTC (Tue) by
tyhik (subscriber, #14747)
In reply to:
Linux loses the Phillips webcam driver by raymond
Parent article:
Linux loses the Philips webcam driver
Open source can win only if it evolves. The problem with
the GPL-ed part of the webcam driver was that the
author declared it will remain unmaintained. And unmaintained
drivers tend to "rot", because kernel's requirements to
drivers change over time.
Linus has explicitly declared that the in-kernel
interfaces won't be immutable. In the long
run this is a very right decision. Companies come and go,
their attitude to open source may change and then change again,
but the kernel must move on.
You know how many mandrake users have blamed mandrake recently
because they were not able to get their nvidia kickass 3d cards
working without recompiling the kernel. The real problem was
that while mandrake enabled
4kB stacks option in the kernel as thousands of inkernel drivers could
happily work with 4k stacks, nvidia was not able to
port their driver to comply with 4k stack requirement for about 5
months. Kernel evolves
and drivers must follow. Unmaintained open source drivers are bad, but
simple changes to them can be made even by people, who are not
overly familiar with the code. Unmaintained (or poorly maintained)
binary drivers are far worse,
as they can generate lot of bad linux experience, while
being fixable only by the author.
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