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A Linux Driver Project status reportA Linux Driver Project status reportPosted Apr 8, 2008 13:56 UTC (Tue) by pointwood (guest, #2814)Parent article: A Linux Driver Project status report
Thanks a lot for all the work! I know nothing about driver development or hacking the kernel, so forgive me if there are reasons this isn't relevant at all, but I'm just thinking that it would be good idea to work together with the other open source operating systems like *BSD and so on? If the drivers are all licensed only under the GPL, that's not possible if I understand correctly)? If they were licensed under the BSD license (and maybe others), it would help the smaller teams like the *BSD teams and the *BSD drivers teams would of course be helping out as well, adding drivers to the pool. Anyway, when I think about now, you guys (being much smarter than I), have probably already thought about that and there's probably a good reason why it isn't like that already. Ps. I'm a Linux user, not a *BSD user, though I have long meant to try out FreeBSD, but never gotten around to it :)
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A Linux Driver Project status report Posted Apr 8, 2008 15:27 UTC (Tue) by mheily (guest, #27123) [Link] This will never happen. Porting code between different kernels is hard enough without the licensing issue. Even if the code was BSD licensed, the OpenBSD developers are totally against the idea of importing device drivers without publicly available documentation. See this KernelTrap article for the reasons why.
A Linux Driver Project status report Posted Apr 9, 2008 6:31 UTC (Wed) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] Well, OpenBSD isn't everyone and yes, I do remember reading that discussion when LDP started. I could imagine some FreeBSD developers would be interested, maybe the primary thing would be to get access to the documentation by signing a NDA. I would think having a company handle the legalese would be nice. Also, even though they would be developing for different platforms (Linux and FreeBSD), they could probably learn something from each other or help each other out understanding the documentation.
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