2011/6/20 Sébastien RAILLARD (COEXSI) <s...@coexsi.fr>: > If I may put my two cents in this discussion regarding the closed source > code problem: maybe it could be great to have some closed source drivers > making some DVB hardware working better or even allowing more DVB hardware > working under Linux. For example, there is a good support of PCI DVB > devices, but not yet so much support for PCIe DVB devices (and even less if > you're searching for DVB-S2 tuner with CAM support at reasonable price).
Nothing prevents a third-party from writing closed source drivers. What we do *not* think is fair though is that those third parties should be able to take advantage of all the GPL code that makes up the DVB core, and the man-years spent developing that code. If somebody wants to write a closed source driver, they are welcome to (in fact, some companies actually have). But I'll be damned if they're going to reuse GPL code to accomplish it. They are welcome to reimplement the DVB core in userland if that is their goal (under whatever licensing terms suits them). > Also, most the DVB drivers code released under GPL is nearly impossible to > understand as there is no documentation (because of NDA agreements with > developers - as I understood) and no inline comments. So does-it make so > much difference with closed source code? I really don't want to aggress > anybody here, but it's really a question I have. I disagree with this assertion. I have worked on *many* different drivers in the DVB subsystem, most of them without having the datasheets. While having the datasheets definitely is helpful (and can definitely speed up debugging), I would argue that they are not essential. Also, a number of the drivers are reverse engineered (no datasheets from the vendor), which is why the registers are not documented (the person writing the code didn't actually know). While there are indeed cases where an NDA specifically prohibited releasing a GPL driver that contained the register names, this tends to be more the exception rather than the rule. All the drivers I have done with vendor assistance/datasheets have allowed me to include register names in the driver. Devin -- Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs http://www.kernellabs.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
