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Linux loses the Philips webcam driverLinux loses the Philips webcam driverPosted Aug 27, 2004 17:49 UTC (Fri) by richo123 (guest, #24309)Parent article: Linux loses the Philips webcam driver
There seems to be a puzzling contradiction here which is potentially quite important: Nvidia currently provides a proprietary driver enabling their 3d graphics cards to work. ATI does the same thing. Why cannot Philips do the same thing? Further there obviously must be some interface in the kernel which allows these latter graphics drivers to work- why are the kernel maintainer not ripping this out to force Nvidia and ATI to provide non-closed drivers? Seems to me like both Philips and the kernel maintainers are not talking to each other properly which leaves the ordinary webcam user like myself high and dry! Come on guys get your act together!
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Linux loses the Philips webcam driver Posted Aug 27, 2004 19:42 UTC (Fri) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] Nvidia and ATI's drivers are not in the kernel tree. They are seperate. The GPL enforces this. The PWC driver refuses to maintain it if it's not in the tree. Philips actually has little to to with this AFAIK, they just provided the info to the driver maintainer under an NDA.
So the issue really is that the driver maintainer doesn't want to conform to this standard. And also that the kernel folks probably should have never let this kind of code in the kernel in the first place.
Linux loses the Philips webcam driver Posted Aug 27, 2004 22:12 UTC (Fri) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link] OK thanks for the clarification. I still do not understand why the Nvidia model could not have been used by the driver maintainer. Is it really too much work? If it is we should petition Philips to do the right thing. It still sounds to me like there is too much petulance altogether on this matter...and my webcam will not work in the future... not a good situation for an OS with desktop aspirations
Linux loses the Philips webcam driver Posted Aug 29, 2004 4:02 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] let's say you suddenly have many oopses on your system. Since you are a decent GNU fellow your system has no propriatary code it. So you start debugging the problem knowing that you have the full source.
Your neighbour, likes the OS you called GNU/Linux not because it is free software, bla, bla bla. He likes Linux cause it's cool. And he knows that he can contact you with any problem. He bought himself a nice Philips webcam in addition to his on-board nvidia display adapter. One of the things he likes to do is displaying the camera's output on the screen in real time. He needs compression for that.
One day his system starts panicing. He calls you. Once you notice that the is not a trivial problem you want to start debugging. So you first need to reproduce the problem in a system without the propriatary drivers (you use the free nv driver, and don't use the webcam). This time it worked. You found the problem.
However it seems that your patch wasn't tested well enough. Your friend suddenly starts getting system hangs. Some signs point to some problems from the direction of the X server. You're called for help once again.
You follow your standard procedure. But this time the problems disappear when the propriatary are removed. Your feeling is that this is an interaction of your fix from yesterday and one of the propriatary drivers. Initial tests point to the NVidia driver.
NVidia is said to have great linux support. And indeed, one day after you send them the bug report they respond. They have tracked it down to a small bug in their code. They were even kind enough to provide you with a test version of the fixed driver.
You install the new driver and it seems that all's well. But suddenly whenever your friend tries to watch the the cammera, his system hangs for a while. A drivers clash again? This time it is between two propriatary drivers. Who can fix the problem? Nobody has the full source: not NVidia and not Philips.
Now suppose that you're not just a helpful geek, but a sysadmin in a network that needs to solve problems fast?
Linux loses the Philips webcam driver Posted Aug 29, 2004 4:42 UTC (Sun) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] After reading a little more about this, it appears that the driver didfollow the model at one time. But the maintainer found it too difficult to keep up with changes so he changed the driver so that it was partially open as an insulation layer against core kernel changes. NVidia does this too, but the open part of their driver isn't shipped as part of the kernel proper. I don't see an inconsistancy here. I still wonder about the "respecting the author's wishes" part.
Linux loses the Philips webcam driver Posted Aug 27, 2004 19:51 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] I think it is probably because there is a bigger money incentive for Nvidia and ATI to do it than Philips. Every sale matters to Nvidia/ATI and making sure that big government contracts for various visualization tools go through because you have Linux support means a lot to the 2 companies.
For Philips.. they could lose ALL their webcam sales and it would be a drop in the bucket of their bottom line. So there is zero incentive to do anything..
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