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Novell Makes Linux Driver Project a Reality
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Sep 28, 2007 02:21 AM
from the giving-back dept.
from the giving-back dept.
apokryphos writes "Novell have relaunched the Linux Driver Project by dedicating well-known kernel developer Greg KH to work on the project full-time. Greg KH writes:
'My employer, Novell, has modified my position to now allow me to work full time on this project. Namely getting more new Linux kernel drivers written, for free, for any company that so desires. And to help manage all of the developers and project managers who want to help out...They really care about helping make Linux support as many devices as possible, with fully open-source drivers.'"
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Know Any Hardware Needing Better Linux Support? 518 comments
Dev Null writes "The Linux device driver project has hit something of a snag: they have lots of developers, but few devices to work on, so they're looking for input concerning which devices aren't well-supported in Linux. If any of you know of devices that could use better support, you can help out by listing them on the project's wiki."
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Cool (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cool (Score:5, Informative)
Never fear, because he's not doing all the coding himself. According to the link in the article, he's had over 100 volunteers to help him out. If he's good at managing them, then 100 talented coders could certainly make a large impact!
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire microsoft patent thing was blown out or portion by both microsoft and the FSF. MS did it to ruffly some feathers and attempt to control large companies not wanting to install the unpopular and somewhat failing Vista OS and the FSF did their part in helping microsoft scare people away from Free and open source product in order to push an unpopular GPL license onto the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
However one action does not fully define a company. Novell has done a great deal to support Linux, but there is no taking away the patent fiasco.
Re:Cool (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire patent protect was for the stuff Novell created that used MS stuff in order to make linux and windows work together. That was the stated goals and reasons from day one. MS offered to cover Novells customers for everything and they didn't turn it down.
I firmly believe that everyone throwing a fit about their partnership knew this to be the case. It is just that there was this license that people didn't like being tossed around and they needed to get support for it. And that is why they came out on several occasions claiming the New GPL version 3 license would stop Novell's deal with Microsoft when there was nothing in the text at the time indicating it would. The entire FUD campaign surrounding that was cooked up to get support for the GPLv3 it seems.
However, even if we disagree on this, I commend you on your second statement about one action doesn't define a company. I'm not a big Novell Fan or anything. I just hate to see the injustice surrounding the entire situation. Novell got a raw deal in what couldn't be anything but self serving for MS and the FSF. In almost anything else I can remember Novell being associated with Linux and free software on, they brought value to the table in more ways then one. Novell has been a big benefit to the Linux community if for nothing else, their stand against SCO when they could have turned a blind eye and let IBM take it all the way. That doesn't seem like someone wanting to hurt Linux or Free software. This move to rekindle the driver program seems contrary to any wishes to hurt linux or F/OSS too.
I'm wandering if having a big name company like Novell behind the push would make hardware manufacturers a little more comfortable about sharing the stuff necessary to make this happen. If I remember correctly, they didn't have that "big name" support the first time around.
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Re:Cool (Score:5, Interesting)
Novell's seen ther linux income grow to $250 million the last quarter, and that includes $100 million of licensing directly from the MS deal.
As you point out, they're spending countless millions in the SCO case, and it looks like "the money's all gone" in the $25 - $30 million they owe SCO. They also put out a decent linux (hey, it configures all 3 video cards in my box first time around, I'm impressed) and they contribute heavily to linux development.
Then I look at the people slagging them - they all have agendas. FSF wrt the GPLv3, (esp. when actual cases prove that the GPLv2 isn't broken), and the buy-in to MS fud from the community at large. Its a wonder they don't just pull an Apple and say "with friends like this, f*** it - lets grab a copy of BSD and put our efforts into that instead."
Its the same with SUN - "SUN is eviiil" - even though we really like the free stuff like OpenOffice (Sun paid $50 million for StarOffice, then released the code) and Java.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
oops - typo - they're owed by SCO ... $25 million, plus interest ...
Please, someone rush a clue to Enderandrew (Score:3, Insightful)
Pardon? you do realise that EVERYONE infringes on EVERYONE elses patents. Almost every damn thing immaginable has been patented. Hell, I'd be surprised if
Re:Cool (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq.html [novell.com]
"Under the patent agreement, both companies will make up-front payments in exchange for a release from any potential liability for use of each others patented intellectual property, with a net balancing payment from Microsoft to Novell reflecting the larger applicable volume of Microsoft's product shipments. Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products."
Novell is paying for being liable for using Microsoft patents, and will also make running royalty payments. If no one violated these patents, then why pay for protection?
It sets a legal precedent that apparently you weren't aware of. Google can help you out with that. So stop the personal attacks and shouting, and please read up on the issue.
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Re:Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Your question is akin to asking "why buy insurance?".
Neither company has perfect information, and they can make a lot of money out of acting as if there were significant risk, and then doing all of this legal ballet to mitigate the risk.
It's a belief system. And if your faith is insufficient to make the subjective leap, quaff the kool aid, take the magic pill, then you can join the rest of us in the crowd that find the whole thing just a tad bit whiffy. It's either a marketing campaign or a cookbook, my friend.
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Re:Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has designed a tollbooth on general Linux usage without naming even a single patent. Novell's agreement with them set the precedent for acknowledging MS vague claims and actually implementing the tollbooth.
It is MS' insurance policy against Windows being pushed aside on the desktop by Linux; they will still get the revenue stream, even if they don't deserve a penny. When Windows sales really start flagging, just watch them start dragging Ubuntu distributors into court.
Novell should not be trusted, even if only for inept greed.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cool (Score:4, Informative)
This was a cross-licensing deal that had NOTHING to do with any patents in linux. Read the bottom - its about Mono (which has nothing to do with linux) and virtualization technologies:
Now lets see ... is MONO part of the linux kernel? Nope. Is Samba part of the linux kernel? Nope. Is OpenOffice part of the linux kernel? Nope. Is .NET part of the linux kernel? Nope. Is Windows Server part of the linux kernel? Nope. And those last two are what Microsoft is paying Novell for (which is why the net flow of money is from Microsoft to Novell, and not vice verse. Microsoft uses a LOT of Novell's IP).
So, there is not a SINGLE part of the agreement that has anything to do with linux, and most of it is money from Microsoft for Novell IP in Windows Server and .NET.
Not a single Microsoft patent in linux, and the agreement doesn't say otherwise. The only one saying so is Balmer, and the "useful fools" who believe what he says; show ONE Microsoft patent in linux. Microsoft has had a year to do it. They can't. Neither can you; the deal was not for "patent coverage for linux."
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Re:Cool (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for Novell until late 2004, well before the Microsoft patent issue. Novell's main business areas then and now are not SUSE incenses, but solutions for platform management and identity management. Both areas require a strong interoperability with Microsoft products, as most big companies have and will continue to have mixed environments. That's is the core of the deal: make possible a better integration between linux and Microsoft product. Just see the recent annoucement about a join laboratory.
it is for sure that some people in the FOS community would prefer to see Microsoft products just vanish from the enterprises, but this is unlikely to happen any time soon, so Novell must take a more conservative approach and accept that they are here to staly for some time. But don't get me wrong: Novell people never liked Microsoft and this is marriage for convenience and unfortunately business are like this.
I think it would be a sign of maturity that the FOS community accepted the facts of life.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft's track record of "working with other companies" isn't very good.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Even those companies who don't like MS understand that switching will take time. While in Novell I had such talks with CIOs of big companies many times and learned that doin
Good to hear - as long as they stay clean.. (Score:5, Interesting)
As drivers are pretty much kernel level activities I would like to see assurances that such development is clean and cannot be used to manufacture truth behind the nebulous IP infringement claims which have stopped in countries where you can't make such statements without having to prove it (which says IMHO a lot in itself).
So, IMHO the news deserves a welcome with caution..
Re:Good to hear - as long as they stay clean.. (Score:5, Interesting)
But this is what your management has done to your brand. Congratulations.
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Re:Good to hear - as long as they stay clean.. (Score:5, Insightful)
And they would be right. The enormous and irrational bias on
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Novell should have known this better than most.
Re:Good to hear - as long as they stay clean.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am 98% a Windows user. I have Microsoft certifications, own an MSDN license, and use it and develop on it. But I have an interest in other OS's: There's an aging Linux partition on my system and a Mac on my wife's desktop. I'm not Microsoft hater, nor an apologist. But the Novell-Microsoft deal outrages me. Novell signs a cross-licensing deal, then claims that they don't infringe on any of Microsoft's patents. Then they claim that they are going to make their Linux more Microsoft friendly, which implies that they will put Microsoft patents into open-source Linux. It's like each sentence that comes from the collective mouth of Novell conflicts with the previous, and the next. All appearances imply that Novell is going to try and poison Linux and try to remain the only one standing because of the patent deal. And Microsoft is using Novell to spread FUD. Even if I have the exact plan wrong, something sinister is going on here.
There's a real reason to hate Novell these days. Maybe even a good explanation of what they are trying to accomplish would change my mind. But for now, I'm avoiding Novell.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's what those few very-vocal poisonous [google.com] people in the OSS community have done. Instead of praising one of the biggest contributors to open-source-software ever (and probably the biggest company in the world contributing to the Linux desktop), they spread FUD around.
I don't like MS more than the next guy, but if people didn't have such an incredible irrational hatred towards anything with the word "MS", and think that anyth
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that there is a lot of hatred for MS here, but you make it sound like MS did not earn some of it.
Calling Linux a virus, calling people who support linux communists, funding SCO, lobbying politicos in Boston - they've done their share to earn this hatred.
Success Stories? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also it would be nice to get a list going of which hardware I should look forward to.
Re:Success Stories? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Here's one:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/09/21/amdati-release-register-specifications-novell-follows-with-alpha-driver [arstechnica.com]
Great idea -- FOSS-friendly promotion wiki (Score:5, Insightful)
That's an excellent idea. A simple wiki page would suffice, providing links to each manufacturer, their open docs page, and their sources page, if any. Use a wiki so that people can add their own entries, and so that the admin can revert abuse easily.
As the list grows, people would start looking there before buying equipment, and to not be listed on it would become a problem for manufacturers by giving their competitors a boost. Don't list manufacturers who don't offer this, as listing them in red might get their lawyers agitated. Omitting them is enough.
Oh, and provide links below it to one or two products produced by each of these friendly manufacturers
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it would be much more benefit to the community just maintaining an HCL people can use while they're shopping for hardware. That there is no such easily accessible list available tell me there is something wrong with the way Linux development relates to average PC users.
To those who criticise those who criticise Tom Tom (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To those who criticise those who criticise Tom (Score:2)
You don't say
Seriously though, your perception of people's perception of Novell is skewed, since you're on Slashdot. Over here Novell is related to Microsoft, and hence causes knee jerk reactions by most of the commenters.
Novell isn't attracting so much negative feedback out of here.
Comparing apples and oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course there is plenty potential for profit by doing things that are helpful. But you are comparing apples and oranges. Novell is helping Linux development for free, because Linux actually also is a Novell product that helps them sell a lot of other stuff in their "natural home market". TomTom sells to end-users, most of whom couldn't care less about Linux. Hell, TomTom developers could even he actively belping Linux kernel development, without it impacting the company's sales (I've seen this happen in
Timing (Score:4, Interesting)
Heck, even when people "downgrade" (upgrade?) to XP, I've heard there can be missing or broken driver issues with some new hardware. Companies figured they would only write Vista drivers for certain new parts.
Linux has made many advances in "average Joe" usability. Combine that with hardware compatibility so good that Linux "works out of the box" BETTER than windows, and Windows starts to look a lot less like it's worth all that money. This could be huge for "mainstream" users.
Here's hoping that the next computer my Grandmother gets is windows free.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Novell always supports opensource (Score:5, Interesting)
So it isn't much a news at all. Anyway, gratz Greg. ^_^
To me, driver problems in Linux are much lesser (Score:3, Informative)
However, where I do feel the pain is, when Linux doesn't recognize my soundchip. That drives me bonkers, and it's still a running concern. I guess Linux users are not into music that much. I just tried booting the newest Xubuntu live CD, and my otherwise puny soundchip wasn't detected. (worked fine on the laptop, though, so it's hit and miss) I hope Novell's efforts will bring at least a small improvement in this area.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And no, I see this as the same half a modem when you have to use your computer to do the functions of the modem. If you buy a device, you should at least expect it to be a complete device. Not to depend on the system processor and memory that you install on your own. IT seems like we are getting
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with the basic idea in the modem analogy, but IMHO the problem with these modems is that they're tied to Windows. Openly specced softmodems do exist, I think they're fine. For one thing, they help save manufacturing resources. On the other hand, graphics cards are justified to have dedicated processors, and even with powerful CPUs there would be interconnect bottlenecks.
Sound cards don't seem to have these problems of CPU-intensive work or transfer bottlenecks. Plus, there are so many ways of pr
Still not the Right(TM) way (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, even this kind of collaboration on the manufacturers' part is better than pretending that Linux doesn't exist at all.
Re:Still not the Right(TM) way (Score:5, Informative)
And, importantly: For a LOT of the hardware on the market, what's important is the chipset used, not wiring around it. And the "hardware manufacturer" has often only done the wiring.
Eivind.
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Documentation (Score:3, Insightful)
Novell apologists read (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a threat to open source, since Novell may just add duhbious terms to the drivers' licenses. Or purpotedly add MS code to them so they are the only ones able to legally distribute them.
Some stuff before the Novell apologists come to bash me:
- Thanks to Novell's deal, the only distro able to legally include moonlight is SUSE enterprise, you are right, not even OpenSUSE, and they say moonlight is open source, sure it is licensed open source but due to 'patent issues' only novell can distribute it, Don't believe me? It is something that both Miguel Icaza and a Novell guy called Bruce have publically accepted, hope a google
- Novell is now actively being a predator spreading FUD and lies about other distros and faking numbers to show how their "superior windows integration" (which is null) is a competitive advantage.
- Novell has accepted MS' proposal of effectively turning Linux into a windows program, so that people can easily migrate their Linux servers to MS' servers, they have accepted that only Linux is going to be virtualized, and 0 virtualization of windows on Linux, Yeah, this is the "open source supporter" Novell, turning Linux into a second class operating system.
- Novell is actually the only company that will support OOXML, oddly enough not even MS would support it if it was approved as an standard, fun?
Denying that Novell's deal is a threat is like denying water is composed of Hydrogen , if you prefer Novell over Linux and open source, friging accept it, but we are growing tired of people that keep their blind Novell fanboyism and pretend they do not want to destroy Linux for their own convenience, they want to make their own propietary, MS dependent OS out of open source projects.Re:Does that mean we can nominate any device? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually, the main problem with the current installation is that the network interface doesn't initialize when the machine first boots, so I need to deactivate it and then
Re:I'm not complaining about /.'s ad policy, but.. (Score:2)
Re:Ths bit sounds fishy... (Score:4, Insightful)
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not the case (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:not the case (Score:5, Informative)
So based on what little I understand about the whole subject, I'd say letting somebody develop a driver under NDA and just releasing the driver source instead of all the documentation is likely to keep a LOT more details about the device essentially secret, even if the code itself was pretty decently commented with remarks about the particular implementation (assuming ofcourse that said internal documetation isn't duplicated in the comments).
Ofcourse that DOES have the effect that anybody willing to improve the driver functionaly in regards to the device would need the same documents under NDA (or reverse-engineer the relevant details, which might be easier with a working driver to tweak), but at least a source driver let's the kernel developers deal with things like driver API changes internally. Say, you want to change the protocol by which drivers reserve IO resources because you've found a new, totally fair way to do that. Now, with binary drivers you can either break the drivers or implement workaround wrappers. Source drivers, you can simply change the driver code yourself without having a clue what the driver actually does.
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Novell trying to bust GPLv3 (Score:4, Insightful)
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