Letters to the editor

Free drivers aren't enough

From:		Karol Lewandowski <kl-AT-jasmine.eu.org>
To:		letters-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		Free drivers aren't enough
Date:		Sun, 20 Aug 2006 21:20:32 +0200

Being non-subscriber, but having read "X.org, distributors, and
proprietary modules" (via Subscriber Link, thanks!) I have few
observations to share.
 
Reading through comments of that fine article made me think. It seems
that for most LWN.net readers (percisely -- for subscribers) having
free driver is very important. I, as ususal, happen to not agree
fully with them.
 
For me, free driver is just small part of the whole picture -- freely
accessible documentation is much more important. Free driver can't be
really free without documentation -- driver written under NDA is
better than dissasembled binary blob, but it's not that great after
all.
 
For me free driver has freely accessible documentation.
 
Given that definition of free driver one can notice that there
is few (if any) free graphics drivers. ATI's r200 drivers were
written under NDA... who will fix the drivers when maintainers will
dissapear? Where is documentation for these hyped Intel Free Drivers?
(I wasn't able to find any.)
 
 
As for NVIDIA and Xorg R7.1 + Fedora Core 5, I also happen to have
different view on that issue.
 
Let's assume for a while that NVIDIA driver is free (but maintained
out-of-tree). Let's also assume that that driver was written by few
dedicated developers under NDA. Now, does this change situation?
I don't think so. If needed changes are really cosmetic, then yeah,
"anyone" could fix that. On the other hand, if fixing problem is more
serve -- i.e. it requires knowledge of hardware registers or something
like that, then we are in exactly same situation as we're now -- we
depend of few people to do the work. It isn't nice.
 
Additionaly there is out-of-tree issue.
 
How it's possible that drivers for utterly-unsupportive company's wifi
chipset (Broadcom) are in mainline kernel but not for the nice one
(Ralink)?
 
I would like to see more support (i.e. preference) for company that
provided free docs!
 
Yes, I know that rt2x00 drivers are in wireless-dev and will be
merged when DeviceScape will be merged too (if ever...) But,
well... Linux developers, especially Linus, was always very
pragmatic... wouldn't that be very pragmatic to provide best
experience (read -- in-tree driver) for those who choose really free
hardware?
 
OpenBSD-like focus on hardware with free docs is something I'm hoping
to see in Linux community some day!
 
 
(Fell free to correct my english, edit this mail or destroy it
altogether :-)
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