On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Luis R. Rodriguez <lrodriguez@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Alan Cox <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> Right -- which is why ideally I think it'd be nice to have an open >>> permissive stack people shared. My preference would be to just pick up >> >> Which we know in practice they won't. They'll sit on fixes (often >> security fixes) and tweak and add private copies of features. In turn the >> Linux one could then only keep up by adding features itself - which would >> have to be GPL to stop the same abuse continuing. >> >> It's a nice idea but the corporations exist to make money and adding >> proprietary custom stack add-ons is clearly a good move on their part to >> do that. > > I agree completely with you. Its up to companies to decide whether or > not they want to do that and ultimately traditionally companies have > preferred not to. I actually think there is more to it than not > wanting though... As I see it without people upstream working for some > of these companies its really hard for them to get these ideas and > actually believe in the possibility of it and the benefits. I'm > voicing this publicly to our own managers and lkml because I'd like to > see that companies get the message because realistically I really > don't expect anything like this has been *seriously* considered > before. When I ask people about it, I often hear people say they think > it'd be nice, but that's about it. Nothing more. No push, no action. > Its to the industry's best interest IMHO. Even if a common 802.11 > stack was shared, if it was permissive licensed companies could still > go on and hack their own proprietary crap on top if they so wish, so > that would still be an option. > > My point with all this thread is this: companies tend to not think out > of the proprietary box they have been put in by old driver development > habits, and driver development should not be so hard and tedious. They > should start considering working on more open solutions even for > proprietary operating systems, under a permissive license. I suspect > this will help out with resources considerations, bug fix propagation > and coordination between supporting different Operating Systems. We > also stand to gain from this on Linux too, after all a driver bug fix > for hardware sensitive code will need to be propagated to other OSes > anyway. > > I can surely ignore the other OSes and their IMHO their terrible > software practices but I can't because although it only affects Linux > in a tedious way I think we can do better and strive for that. If > sharing an 802.11 stack seems like a pipe dream oh well, at least I > think we should consider opening up the code for the other OSes and > let communities help with that crap for our company. Let it evolve > naturally. The benefits of FOSS cannot just only benefit Linux. Maybe what we need is a BSD guy at Atheros :) Luis -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
