Pointless ideology? [LWN.net]

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 10:09 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

Looking at the fact in the PWC story, the morale is not about binary modules,
it is "Never sign a NDA". I am sure Nemosoft would be more than happy to
opensource the binary driver, but the NDA prevent it.
So if you contemplate writing a device driver for Linux the first rule is, do
not sign any NDA, that can only make things _more_difficult.

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Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 11:26 UTC (Thu) by dvrabel (subscriber, #9500) [Link]

The NDA has expired[1] and I remain unconvinced by Nemosoft's arguments regarding not opening the source -- seeing as in the past 2 months he appears to have not contacted Phillips to clarify.

[1] http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/

Sneakiness and Arrogance

Posted Sep 2, 2004 16:19 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

I agree. Nemosoft objects to the kernel policy. He sneaked in a violation, and then tried to force Linus to continue allowing it. Linus refused to be blackmailed, and was only too happy to get those dirty fingerprints out of his kernel.

Evidently, this guy doesn't care about anybody who has the camera; his own ideological power games are more important to him. The clincher is the NDA: if it weren't about power games, he could have just GPLed the decompression code too.

It's just too bad that this didn't happen three years ago, so that people wouldn't have bought those cameras thinking they were properly supported.