Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later [LWN.net]

Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

Posted Aug 29, 2011 23:15 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

> The kernel process can be quite wasteful

... unlike closed source developments, where millions and millions of dollars would never ever end up wasted :-)

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Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

Posted Aug 31, 2011 22:09 UTC (Wed) by mhelsley (guest, #11324) [Link] (5 responses)

The article remains quite correct. It really doesn't matter whether closed source processes are better or worse. The real issue is whether/how the *kernel* process can/will be improved to help avoid "wasting" those resources.

Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

Posted Aug 31, 2011 22:19 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

Breaking news: after ignoring (open) source code from closed source shops, the Linux kernel community now decides to ignore their processes as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here

Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

Posted Sep 1, 2011 7:58 UTC (Thu) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926) [Link] (1 responses)

I refuse to use this nomenclature, as it doesn't meet my own already established patterns or integrate well with the tools I use every day.

I have created my own expression for this phenomenon, which I call Invented Somewhere Else (ISE). This has numerous advantages over the current NIH tool, but I do not have the space or time to document them here. I encourage you to try ISE, and find its benefits for yourself - they're easy to spot even without my guidance.

I hope to merge ISE into English Mainline for the 2012 release, once I've convinced its maintainers that my writing style is not idiosyncratic and obscure but is in fact superior and inspired.

Watch this space!

Adopting ISE

Posted Sep 6, 2011 7:46 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

It was hard to get (I blame the early hour and the relative lack of caffeine), but thanks for a good laugh! Self-referencing humor always cracks me up.

Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

Posted Sep 9, 2011 9:52 UTC (Fri) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link]

If you ignore all the rationale, arguments and history, you might get away with blaming this to NIH. However, given how this turned out, if b43 would not be on par with Broadcom's driver, the outcome would have been different, despite it Not having been Invented Here.

And that is exactly what one would expect.

Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

Posted Sep 1, 2011 8:15 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> The article remains quite correct. It really doesn't matter whether closed source processes are better or worse. The real issue is whether/how the *kernel* process can/will be improved to help avoid "wasting" those resources.

Dare I ask, might part of the problem here be lumping too much together into one piece of software? If you look into user-space, you see healthy competition between (free) projects such as NetworkManager and ConnMan [1] which presumably benefit both and all users. I'm not saying that a situation where every driver lives for itself, as is customary in other OSes (or the old situation where every wireless driver on Linux included its own IEEE 802.11 stack), would be an improvement, but if say competing complete wireless subsystems complete with drivers could co-exist without one of them having to be the single chosen one, we might be able to cut out some of the time wasted on politics. No, I didn't say the MK word.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/456967/