On binary drivers and stable interfaces

Posted Nov 10, 2005 15:04 UTC (Thu) by cooperstein (subscriber, #1139) [Link]

I often have to deal with drivers which while written under GPL, are
very poorly written. Sometimes they may perform well enough, and
not be very buggy, but they use all kinds of hacks to work with
only one or a few kernel releases, and are almost impossible to
port forward to even minor changes in kernel API and headers.

Overall I think this is a good thing -- by releasing under GPL
they at least give kernel developers a start and an opportunity
to push a better driver upstream. However, I wish rather than
producing these hacks they'd put a little more effort into
respecting kernel practices and standards -- in many cases it
would be less work, not more.

The "you can do anything you want as long as it is GPL" attitude
is very widespread in the corporate culture, and while it is
better than promotion of binary drivers, further education is needed.