On Thursday 01 March 2007, Russell Jones wrote:
Yet few people object (that I've heard) to copyright firmware being uploaded to devices, e.g. in Hauppage's dec-2000t. How is this different? I wonder what stops nv/ati from providing a GPL driver that just does an upload of copyright/patented firmware (freely available for download) providing the required APIs?
That's what I've been suggesting. Some sort of standardized interface, perhaps designed by the Linux video driver bunch that handles all current mechanisms and allows room for growth, but which all Distros (even windows) to adopt as the way you talk to a video card. This is what ndis drivers did for network cards and it works quite well. Admittedly, Video is more complex. But they should keep their complexity on their card where it belongs, and not expect everybody to accept these binary blobs into their distro, especially after it has been demonstrated in at least one case that this lead to a privledge escalation in at least one instance. As for nobody complaining about Hauppage's situation, thats not exactly the same thing. The firmware is not distributed by suse or any other distro that I know of. You still have to go get the firmware, but its freely available. Hauppage at least cooperates with (or does not hinder) the linux community in building open source software drivers. (ivtv, etc). The ivtv drivers are the software running in linux, and they are open source. The card just gets a binary image from the driver at boot time. But that image only runs in the card, unlike video drivers from ati/nv. Never the less, even hauppage's ivtv drivers taint the kernel. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen