Open specs

Posted May 15, 2008 11:30 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi by mtall
Parent article: Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

It is an uphill battle to convince company XYZ that open specs are better than trade secrets.

Companies don't have to release their trade secrets at all. Greg KH has started a project just for that task, so that hardware developers don't have to release specs if they don't want to. Sure, competitors will have the source code to the driver, but they have to reverse-engineer that too -- and while it is easier than with binaries, it is not automatic either.

IMHO, keeping trade secrets in the driver is not such a good idea; they can be reverse-engineered fairly easily. The most successful hardware devices conform to standards anyway, and those things that give Linux users the most grief (software suspend, power management, BIOS problems, graphic card modes) seem to be those that deviate from their respective standards.

This "automagic" process is neither automatic nor magic: there is considerable economic cost involved.

What flewellyn means is that once a driver is in the kernel, the hardware developer doesn't need to worry about it anymore: the kernel community will update it whenever it is necessary.

Someone still needs to write the driver

Again, the Linux Driver Project is willing to do exactly that. I believe this project is doing a great service to the kernel community, if only to remove a couple of sore points that can be used as excuses by hardware developers.