Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc)

Linus Torvalds
2004-08-29T18:09:42Z

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> He is not sole author. Large parts of the code are based on other
> authors work and simply copied from the standard framework. Please put
> back the version without the hooks. It is useful to all sorts of people
> in that form.

Are you willing to stand up for that and be the maintainer for it?

I'm disgusted by how many people have been complaining, yet when I ask
people to step up and actually _do_ something about it, people suddenly
become very quiet, or continue complaining about it ignoring the
fundamental issue.

Everybody (including you, Alan, so don't go hoity-toity on us) has
apparently totally ignored my calls for a new maintainer, and asking the
people involved who wrote parts of the driver for their input. I quote an
email from me:

Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 11:13:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
To: Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
Craig Milo Rogers <rogers@isi.edu>,
Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
webcam@smcc.demon.nl
Subject: Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc)

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Xavier Bestel wrote:
>
> What if someone steps up and want to maintain and extend this piece of
> code ? Will you forbid him (as in "not in my tree") ?

I'd suggest you contact the people who have worked on that driver (there's
certainly people outside of nemosoft, at least according to the
changelogs) and see what they feel like and try to gauge how much they
were part of driver development.

...

I've got _lots_ of emails in my mailbox complaining.

I don't have a _single_ one actually responding for my calls to actually
_do_ something about the driver.

Until people turn from whiners to doers, nothing will happen.

Linus