More conversation links [LWN.net]

More conversation links

Posted Aug 27, 2004 20:12 UTC (Fri) by lucat (guest, #15102)
In reply to: More conversation links by wcooley
Parent article: Linux loses the Philips webcam driver

> In case the answer is "No", then I will:
> - demand that the PWC driver is removed from any further Linux kernel
> releases; Open source or not, it"s still _my_ work.

It looks like a demand to me.
Greg did the right thing removing it, but this doesn't change the fact that the author of the driver CANNOT demand it to be removed. He can _ASK_ for it to be removed, but that's all he can do.

Bye,
Luca

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More conversation links

Posted Aug 27, 2004 20:19 UTC (Fri) by lucat (guest, #15102) [Link]

I also want to add this... it seems to me that Nemosoft believes that the contract that he signed with Philips (the _expired_ NDA) is more important than the contract that he signed with everyone of us (the GPL).
He can for sure think this... it is his right to do so... but this should also warn us that accepting closed-source code inside the Kernel will make our hardware dependent on the decisions of a particular company. When they will stop supporting new Kernel versions we will be forced to change our perfectly working hardware... this is unacceptable to me (when i buy something i want to be free to use it how i want and for how long i want) and this is why we should strongly oppose binary-only drivers in Linux. This is my opinion at least.

Bye,
Luca