On 04/14/2011 01:14 PM, Brian K. White pecked at the keyboard and wrote:
On 4/14/2011 12:22 PM, Marco Calistri wrote:
On Thu 14 Apr 2011 at 11:34:25 (-0300 UTC) j debert wrote:
On 04/12/2011 03:34 PM, Insomniac wrote:
Philips webcams used to work fantastically in SuSE, all the way up to 10.3 IIRR. For some odd reason the kernel people or the suse people or whomever it was, decided to remove the part that made them work. You know, the 'fix what ain't broke' people.
The original pwc module maintainer eventually quit out of frustration with the kernel maintainers. This was covered on Slashdot at the time and the "discussion" was furious. It very much seemed as if the maintainer was being singled out by the kernel people and intentionally and specifically blocked from including his modules. The module's maintenance was taken up by another developer who stopped maintaining it not long after.
The original kernel module was in two parts, one of which was a proprietary binary which provided the larger format compression routines. The maintainer could not provide source until the NDA with Phillips expired, which occurred about a year after he quit. It's unfortunate the original maintainer quit: The original modules worked the best. They worked well up to OpenSuSE 10.3 but sometime before end-of-life, something changed enough to break the modules. Since then, nothing for these webcams has worked well, if at all.
jd My sincere compliments to this unaceptable group of devs which are willing "to close an open software".
The result is that Microsoft will continue to be present massively as the "de facto" O.S. for millions of users.
Regards,
How about if you have to piss on someone blame the manufacturer who insisted on supplying a binary-only black mystery box? You can't fault anyone else for being uninterested in wasting their time and talents one such a dead end instead of working on more rewarding and forward looking products and projects.
You also can't fault anyone for having the deeper understanding that something is not always better than nothing. Having hardware that can't _possibly_ be made to work reliably and stable because the quality, compatibility, and behavior of some of the code, much less kernel level code that can affect the entire system, can't be ensured or audited or even properly debugged, is all in all far worse for linux and all linux users than having that hardware simply be not available at all.
Yes, it's true you don't always have a simple choice to use other hardware. Laptops come with whatever they come with and if you need a particular laptop for other reasons, and the built-in webcam or sd card reader don't work, well that's just the breaks. It's just one more of the many factors that must be weighed when purchasing.
Feel free to write a good driver that's all visible forward maintainable source if it matters so much to you.
Or dig in and pursue the trails left behind from the last time it was being worked on. Lookup anyone who ever signed the NDA and had the source, verify the expiration theory that it's really ok for them to publicize the source now, and try to find one of them to give it to you, then update it to the current kernel and figure out what was wrong with it before other than having a binary-only component and address that.
Then when you get tired of that, or if you don't even start, we can all insult you for it.
Bravo, +1 -- Ken Schneider SuSe since Version 5.2, June 1998 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org