This assumes there *is* documentation. [LWN.net]

This assumes there is documentation.

Posted Oct 9, 2006 23:11 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
Parent article: Device drivers and non-disclosure agreements

For documentation to be released, there has to be documentation in the first place. It is fairly common that there is no "programming document" to be released. The internal docs may take the form of a series of web pages, comments in their source code, or other such things.

Producing (useful) documentation takes a lot of time, effort, and money, and when it comes down to it, not many people actually want to be able to hack the hardware directly -- they generally want something higher-level instead.

It's also a question of support. For chips intended to be designed into custom products, there's a lot of documentation, as that helps you sell more chips. But will having open specs help Intel (for example) sell more wireless modules? nope -- but an open driver might.

There are arguments to be made on both sides of the NDA fence, and no simple answer.

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This assumes there *is* documentation.

Posted Oct 11, 2006 1:22 UTC (Wed) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

What hasn't happened yet is a hardware vendor set up a wiki (with reasonable editorial control) and let the community do the documentation.
The reason that hasn't happened yet is that no business case has been made.
I'm pretty sure that if a company felt there was profit in doing so, it would have since been done.
I, for one, wouldn't attack Mr. Corbet for writing a driver under NDA. Spreading computational power to other corners of the planet, even under sub-optimal conditions, is likely to help create better market conditions for hardware vendors to move openly documented chips.
Or just grow a legion of reverse-engineers.
Something is better than nothing.