OSDL and the kernel community [LWN.net]

OSDL and the kernel community

Posted Jan 27, 2006 21:39 UTC (Fri) by ca9mbu (guest, #11098)
In reply to: OSDL and the kernel community by einstein
Parent article: OSDL and the kernel community

I don't quite understand how OSDL signing an NDA would work. NDA's, by definition, mean you're not allowed to disclose the information they contain. By using the spec to implement an open source kernel driver, surely that developer is then disclosing (at least some of) the information contained in the spec, no? Caveat: I'm not a kernel/driver developer, nor have I ever seen an NDA or any documents released under one!

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OSDL and the kernel community

Posted Jan 27, 2006 22:17 UTC (Fri) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link] (3 responses)

The NDA that would be signed would specifically allow the production
of code that is released under the GPL.

OSDL and the kernel community

Posted Jan 28, 2006 3:00 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (1 responses)

In other words, NVidia, for example, would not be interested. Basically this would be interesting to companies that don't want to give their actual specs away publicly, and are not interested in writing their own drivers for Linux, to get a bit more market share without giving too much away in a form that would make it too easy for their competitors to exploit, and without to heavy an expenditure on their part. Is that the idea?

OSDL and the kernel community

Posted Jan 28, 2006 3:30 UTC (Sat) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link]

That is exactly correct.

OSDL and the kernel community

Posted Jan 28, 2006 10:29 UTC (Sat) by ca9mbu (guest, #11098) [Link]

Thanks very much for the cluebat, Greg!

OSDL and the kernel community

Posted Feb 2, 2006 19:59 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Often, the information in a GPL device driver isn't really that much more than the information you could get by reverse engineering using a bus analyzer, a closed device driver, and a program written to exercise the functionality. The driver discloses a series of interactions that cause the hardware to do a particular known set of things, but not necessarily why you know it will work or how you might make it do something different. And, of course, the comments will tend to reference the spec, so someone who's signed the NDA can tell why the code is right (or if it's wrong), but someone without the spec doesn't get much out of it. Of course, people who don't have the spec could try to reconstruct it be modifying the driver slightly in various ways and seeing what happens, but that's prohibitively time-consuming compared to having a document that states the correct generalizations. So a number of companies offer NDAs that allow writing free drivers based on the specs, and the new thing is just that OSDL can act as an intermediary on the agreements, rather than individual developers having to contact manufacturers.