>> Speaking as the maintainer and copyright owner I can say that it would >> have been nice if someone had contacted me privately re the matter, >> before hand. Not to assert any legal right, not for any approval, >> simply as a courtesy and a perhaps a small 'Thank You'. NetUp could >> have happily had my personal blessing on their project. > > you could have said thank you for porting the driver as well: The port > enlarges the user base, is likely to uncover bugs and you might even > receive fixes to those bugs for free (unless the ranting goes on). I care not for a windows port, it's of no interest to me. I'm sure NetUp Windows customers will find it useful. >> My first concern is that this only benefits NetUp on Windows, no other >> company benefits on windows - as they all already have legal access to >> the Conexant source reference driver. > > Are you implying that > a) it's not the users who benefit most? > b) other companies won't be able to use this driver? > c) NetUp doesn't have legal access to the reference driver? I was simply stating my opinion, it not a list of points I wish to debate with you or anyone else. Please don't take this comment personally. You are welcome to your own opinion and draw your own conclusions on how I feel about the matter. >> The Windows GPL driver >> could/will evolve much faster than the Linux driver and that will suit >> NetUp commercially and nobody else. Time will not be taken to >> "backport" changes into the Linux driver and that's bad for the Linux >> community. (Or, for commercial reasons, the backports will take longer >> than expected) > > Why don't you do the backports yourself? You want NetUp to do the work > for you? The code is published in a Git repository. You can easily track > any changes. Yes, I could, thanks to github. > >> My second concern is that NetUp have made it very simply for the >> hundreds of no-name third party far-east companies (with zero >> legitimate access to the Conexant windows source reference driver), to >> take the windows driver, close source it, not distribute their changes >> and compete against the few legitimate TVTuner companies left in the >> world. If/when the one or two remaining TVTuner companies die because >> their bread and butter Windows sales are being eroded to zero - how >> does this help this community? It doesn't, it only helps NetUp. > > Any company doing that could use any existing binary driver as well. > Besides that, I'm sure it's no problem for them to get access to any > reference driver they want. I think I respectfully disagree with you. >> I embrace open source, I welcome new developers, debate and growth.... >> I just think if you are going to get my 18 year old daughter pregnant >> then it's courtesy to knock on my door and introduce yourself first - >> regardless of my opinion or your legal rights. > > A very compelling analogy. Best wishes, - Steve -- Steven Toth - Kernel Labs http://www.kernellabs.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
