Mixed feelings [LWN.net]

Mixed feelings

Posted Jan 10, 2009 1:54 UTC (Sat) by nowster (subscriber, #67)
In reply to: Mixed feelings by pr1268
Parent article: Open source firmware for Broadcom wireless adapters

Why should Broadcom bother giving the Linux community driver code, specs, or other documentation, if the community will just go figure it out on its own?

Control. It's possible we might eventually do a better job of it than they did.

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Mixed feelings

Posted Jan 10, 2009 10:57 UTC (Sat) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

> It's possible we might eventually do a better job of it than they did.

I think this is hardly possible.
Yeah, we do better for one device or two, but we do a _lot_ worse for 200 other types of devices. And this is not going to change without broadcom releasing some PHY code.

Hardware manufacturers are not to be trusted with drivers or firmware

Posted Jan 13, 2009 14:08 UTC (Tue) by prl (guest, #44893) [Link]

It's quite probable that "we" will do a better job.

If the hw manufacturers genuinely open up specs, the result is usually open source that works better than what they can provide. There are many reasons why hw makers do not want to do so (the LinuxBIOS guys much experience here) - not the least being that they can disguise bugs and security holes. Also, hw vendors (particularly their marketing people) are obsessed with differentiation and Unique Selling Points - and most hardware is actually just like any other really, far more than they want to admit.

Remember that the motivation of hw vendors is to sell you their kit, not to make it work well - it only has to work well enough that you buy it, whether directly or via a system integrator. Open source developers and users want to make it work *well*.

Hardware manufacturers are not to be trusted with drivers or firmware

Posted Jan 13, 2009 15:34 UTC (Tue) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

I'm not talking about OpenSource in general. Of course, OpenSource generally can be better than closed stuff.

But I was talking about reverse engineered stuff. In my experience, with the reverse engineered stuff you can hardly get better than the binary stuff it was based on. You can only get as good as the reverse engineered stuff and add a few more bugs. So you end up worse.
The problem with reverse engineered stuff is, that you don't understand what lots of the code actually does. So it's very hard to spot bugs that were in the binary blob and fix them in your open code.

Of course, there are always a few exceptions to this rule. For example some BCM4311 flavours, which work better with b43 than with the native windows driver.