free linux drivers

I see that Greg Kroah has a post on how kernel driver developers are willing to write drivers for devices that don't currently have drivers.

This is a wonderful initiative. There'll probably be some good results from it. I doubt if it'll make a big difference though with a lot of the things that cause the most trouble now. At some point I read that one of the reasons there are no nvidia source drivers for linux (why nvidia provides binary drives but not source) is because of patent concerns. They will provide binary drivers because they must. No drivers, no sales. Binary drivers are much harder to analyze for internal operations than are source drivers. Source drivers, on the other hand, more easily expose the internals of the hardware to reverse engineering. And if this or that piece of hardware violates a patent, then the company that manufactures that hardware could be in for a long and expensive fight (with a possible loss at the end).

Many devices will gain linux drivers with this initiative, particularly those devices which are not particularly leading edge (multi-tool device [swiss knife] with USB flash drive and MP3 player anyone?) and which are manufactured in countries (cough, cough, peoples republic of china) which don't have much in the way of intellectual property law enforcement. I hope that nvidia sees the light. A friend of mine has problems with his computer, he runs windows since he can't figure out a way to get his nvidia card to work in linux, even with the free nvidia ethernet device driver. I've had problems with wifi and winmodems and sound cards from time to time, on one laptop or another. Anything that can help will be good. I'm not sanguine though, about higher end hardware that needs to maintain its high end performance characteristics by ignoring possible patents in the field.

Some of those patents might even be bogus. Microsoft recently pulled back a patent application on some functionality in its visual development environment because the functionality was clearly stolen from BlueJ and the authors of BlueJ made a stink about it because the patent might mean that they wouldn't be able to use BlueJ even though BlueJ demonstrated prior art, because fighting the patent would be so expensive (unacceptable for a small open source project with no cash flow). If the U.S. patent system were to collapse it would be a good thing for the world. Of course it won't, the U.S. patent system is supported by lobbyists and U.S. military might. That military might be incompetent to bring peace anywhere in the world, but it is plenty competent enough to destroy anything in its path. So, no, the U.S. patent system, with its built-in stupidities will continue to keep the world from progress in many fields, among them, free software and the development of drivers for free software ecosystems.