<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/16/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Christopher A. Bier</b> <<a href="mailto:chris.bier@cymor.com">chris.bier@cymor.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----<br>Hash: SHA1<br><br>Linus shot that down.<br><a href="http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/13/370">http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/13/370</a><br></blockquote></div><br>And a damned good thing he did, too. For the forseeable future, there are going to be hardware manufacturers who don't have the budget to do driver development for Linux in a 'cleanroom', separated from their Windows driver work. The tools that Microsoft provides to companies for building drivers come with proprietary MS stuff in them, and attached NDAs that forbid them releasing the source to anyone who hasn't also signed the NDA.
<br><br>And they have the gall to call the GPL 'viral'.<br><br>Anyway, those companies simply are not going to release source code. They'll either not support Linux at all, or do it in userspace like Linus said. Either way, preventing binary drivers would be a feel-good, do-nothing act.
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