Trilight Zone

[tricore]

In a recent blog entry, kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman offered the services of the Linux kernel community to create free Linux device drivers for companies. Recently, Kroah-Hartman revealed on his blog that companies are taking him up on the community's offer.

In a note entitled, "Free Linux Driver Development Questions and Answers!," Kroah-Hartman wrote that he and the developers working with him had already "received a number of serious queries from companies about producing Linux drivers for their devices. More information will be available later when details are firmed up."

It seems that this is more than just a token handful of companies. "The initial response to this was amazing," said Kroah-Hartman. "A measurable number of new Linux drivers will be created thanks to this program."

Kroah-Hartman also explained how the group will be able to create GPL2 open-source drivers after signing NDA (non-disclosure agreements) with vendors without resorting to using binary blobs or some other way of obfuscating the code. He said that the NDAs are "usually signed either to keep information about the device private until it is announced at a specific date, or to just keep the actual specification documents from being released to the public directly. All code created by this NDA program is to be released under the GPL for inclusion in the main kernel tree, nothing will be obfuscated at all."

This explanation doesn't sit at all well with some developers. In particular, some OpenBSD developers have voiced strong objections to this plan.

In the OpenBSD misc mailing list, for example, as recorded at Kernel Trap, OpenBSD developer, Marco Peereboom, wrote, "This is awesome, you protect the vendors by pretending to provide free code. This is so funny that I have tears in my eyes." Peereboom continued, "The GPL has become the new safe harbor for companies who don't want to play in the open source world."

Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD's founder, went even further with his criticism: "It is a f***ing farce. You are trying to make sure that maintainers of code -- ie. Any random joe who wants to improve the code in the future -- has LESS ACCESS to docs later on because someone signed an NDA to write it in the first place."

As for Kroah-Hartman's explanation about NDAs, de Raadt dismisses it, "You cannot FAQ that problem out of existence."

Kroah-Hartman's last response to the subject thread was that "As my goal is to have a GPL driver for everything, I don't see how this can hurt. Now others can have different goals, and that's great and fine. I'm not saying you can't work on something if you wish to do so."

"But for you to try to tell me that I shouldn't work to achieve my goal, as it somehow conflicts with your goals, is pretty rude, don't you think?," the Linux developer concluded.