There cannot be any equal vote on the subject. Project UDI is set to achieve
what Linux has already achieved. Linux developers have already written new
drivers (of highest quality) for the thousands of peripherals on the market
(and would write more if there were specs available). That's why Project UDI
is hoping the Linux community will help, and that's why Linux would be key to
the adoption of the UDI initiative.
If Project UDI members are really counting on the Linux community to work on
device drivers, they should make them and/or hardware specs available, so that
Linux community can actually _work_ on them. However, the effort that will be
put into work, should be repayed somehow. That's why the UDI specifications
should _explicitly request_ that UDI-conformant drivers are GPL (or a variant
of GPL), so that open source community, a major participant in the deal, can
benefit from the project also. Nobody will nor can stop hardware vendors, who
produce special hardware (or believe that their hardware is such), from shipping
binary-only drivers that can actually work in some UDI-conformant environments,
but without the "UDI-conformant" tag. The tag should be used to mark a driver
that has a guarantee that it can at least be made to work in any UDI-conformant
environment, if it does - for various reasons, such as a non-supported platform
or operating system, bugs etc - not work yet.
Linux is on its fast way to becoming the most successfull UNIX variant ever, I
think that's pretty obvious by now. And GPL, together with the work of many
many people from the GNU generation, is what made it such. Getting the UDI deal
any other way than GPL would be a step back for the whole UNIX community.
Andrej
-- Andrej Presern, andrejp@luz.fe.uni-lj.si- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/