Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

[Konstantinos Margaritis <markos-sEEEE4iEDtaXzmuOJsdVMQ@public.gmane.org>]

On 22 December 2010 21:22, Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org> wrote:
> Having accommodations in the kernel for proprietary drivers is not a
> mutual benefit anymore.  That might be hard to understand from your
> point of view, but the incentives in the Open Source communities aren't
> based on commercial results.

DISCLAIMER: I'm also a Debian developer -have been since 1999 with a
small 2y break- so I _do_ know the F/OSS community point of view. My
goals have been always in promoting open source and free software
solutions when and when not available. Right now open source solutions
are _not_ available, and that is the problem.

I haven't reversed engineered any driver so I can't claim of knowledge in this
matter. However I've been following closely other such projects like nouveau
and it took them a _long_ time to get to this point here -which may be usable
for many people, but it's not even at a beta state according to the Nouveau
developers. Even if we assume the fact that 10 times more ARM F/OSS
developers gather to reverse engineer the binary blobs, how long do you think
it would take until a beta driver appears? 1 year? 2 years? And what will happen
in the meantime?

I'm not advocating that closed source drivers be included in the
kernel, but IMHO,
having an open kernel-space driver would also help the reverse engineering
process at the same time as allowing common users as well as developers to
use and test any 3D applications -don't forget that 3D problems don't
end at the driver,
rather the opposite.

Konstantinos

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