Hi, There seems to be an ongoing need for a stronger relationship between the kernel development community and the various hardware vendors. Specifically, the current situation seems to often be that individuals from the community are banging on random doors and sending e-mail to support staff asking whether they can be given access to device specs under NDA or, preferably, with no restrictions for the purposes of driver development. It seems to me that IBM's commitment to spend $1B this coming year on Linux development, combined with IBM's considerable influence in the general computing space might enable them to help the Linux kernel community forge new and much closer relationships with IHVs. Ideally, these new relationships would involve more information being pushed to us rather than pulled by us. An area in of great need of access to specifications is USB development. Things are going well with reverse engingeering for many devices, but this is slow, prone to error and probably misses taking advantage of proprietary speedups available from intimate specification knowledge. This is particularly true when we come up against vendor-specific USB protocol implementations. Would it make any sense to ask these large corporate participants whether they would be willing to put together some sort of device specification collection group along with members of the Linux kernel community? A group including representatives of these many groups might have more leverage with IHVs than the Linux kernel community has now. I hope this helps, Miles - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/