The return of the Philips driver? [LWN.net]

The return of the Philips driver?

Posted Sep 3, 2004 17:50 UTC (Fri) by horen (subscriber, #2514)
Parent article: The return of the Philips driver?

It is important to view the pwc/pwcx driver/decompressor in the context of all webcams which rely on them. In addition to the Philips family of webcams (11 models), the following make/models also use Philips chips, necessitating use of the pwc/pwcx driver/decompressor:

Askey:         VC010
Creative Labs: Webcam 5, Webcam Pro Ex
Logitech:      QuickCam 3000 Pro, QuickCam 4000 Pro, QuickCam Notebook 
               Pro, QuickCam Zoom, QuickCam Orbit/Sphere
Samsung:       MPC-C10, MPC-C30
Sotec:         Afina Eye
AME:           Afina Eye
Visionite:     VCS UM100, VCS UC300

This, as we say, is not "chopped liver"; neither are the multitude of Linux users who presently use these products (or Windows users who contemplate upgrading to Linux). Moreover, the manufacturers of these products are not going to stop using Philips chips.

At the same time that the ideological-purity of the GPL must be maintained, so, too, must pwc/pwcx-dependent hardware users not be disenfranchised.

My $0.02, YMMV.

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The return of the Philips driver?

Posted Sep 5, 2004 1:51 UTC (Sun) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

Those people were disenfranchised when they bought proprietary hardware; they were further disenfranchised when the original author demanded the driver's removal from the kernel. This is not a fight between ideological purity and users' rights -- it's a fight between software hoarders and users' rights, as it almost always is.