TAG | Making hardware vendors love open source |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Wednesday, 30 January 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 A second way, Hohndel said, was by helping people like kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman who made an offer in January last year that kernel developers would develop free drivers for manufacturers who provided the necessary technical details. For example, there were many small hardware vendors in Taiwan who could not afford to write Linux drivers, he said. He cautioned against public calls for boycotts, saying that it was more likely to invite retaliatory legal action rather than achieve any positive outcome. Thirdly, Hohndel touched on documentation, pointing out that there were more chips produced today which did not have programmer's manuals than ever before. They were done by small teams and in many cases the chip designer, driver author and firmware author sat together, consulted and then the driver was written. A solution to this was for the vendor to create documentation by proxy - do a low-spec driver and publish the details as open source. The community could then engage and write the needed proper drivers. Hohndel touched on intellectual property concerns, pointing out that if company-critical IP was revealed by explaining to people how to use a device, then something was wrong with the definition of the IP. But, convincing hardware people that publishing a programmer's manual would not infringe on their IP was very difficult, he added. He said he used the example of the 386 when trying to explain to his own company how valuable this kind of documentation was to software writers. Two Intel employees - both now in high positions in the company - published a comprehensive book a long time back on programming the 386 and it was this documentation which enabled Linus Torvalds to write the Linux kernel. Asking whether they had done the right thing generally helped others to see things his way, he said. Hohndel also discussed regulatory concerns arising from the fact that some devices - graphics cards and wireless cards - tend to be a combination of hardware and software. Some features for a hardware device could be provided through software and thus it became part of the driver; no company would be willing to reveal proprietary algorithms that went into the software and gave it the edge over a competitor, he added. He urged open source developers to encourage the right behaviour - "there needs to be more of a penalty for doing the wrong things. We are so willing to work on our own to fix a company's problem. That is stupid, dumb," he said. The only way was to get documentation by the methods he had outlined. "Engage and listen, offer to help, offer to educate," he concluded.
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