Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc)

Anton Altaparmakov
2004-08-27T21:48:43Z

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:

> On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > But Greg is right - we don't keep hooks that are there purely for binary
> > drivers. If somebody wants a binary driver, it had better be a whole
> > independent thing - and it won't be distributed with the kernel.
>
> So how come we allow drivers which load binary firmware into the kernel?
> And there are plenty of them...
>
> There isn't very much difference between binary firmware and the binary
> module in this case. Lets see what each of these does:
>
> - binary firmware: protects the intellectual rights of the people who
> designed the chips by not showing anyone how they work by not showing the
> original program code that drives the chips
>
> - binary module at hand: protects the intellectual rights of the people
> who designed the chips by not showing anyone how they work by not
> showing the original program code that drives the extended functionality
> of the chips
>
> Sound simillar?
>
> IMHO they are identical except that the firmware is downloaded to the
> hardware and executed by a different cpu while the binary module is
> executed by the host cpu.

I was a bit fast, there is the issue of different arhitectures for the
host cpu but if the producers of the binary code care they would produce
the appropriate binary code for each architecture. I do not know if this
is done in this case or not but it certainly is doable...

> So how come binary firmware is welcome and binary modules which extend
> functionality are not?
>
> Just curious. (I personally prefer everything to be OSS but I do
> understand that some companies do not want to do this and I do have
> sympathy for their reasons in some cases.)
>
> Best regards,
>
> Anton
>

Best regards,

Anton
--
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Unix Support, Computing Service, University of Cambridge, CB2 3QH, UK
Linux NTFS maintainer / IRC: #ntfs on irc.freenode.net
WWW: http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/ & http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/