by updatelee » Tue Jul 02, 2013 11:00 pm
Although I dont 100% agree or disagree with the wiki entry, its personal opinion.
I myself am in that boat with my kernel module tree, its 100% open source with no precompiled binaries at all. I fully support the open source community and have no interest in precompiled binaries as they severely limit my choice of kernel as well as what I can change within the kernel.
I do understand though why some companies cant release everything under open source, its quite often but not always the chip manufacturers. Sometimes its the fact they wont allow any code to be public based off their datasheets / sdk's Other times its just a licensing issue. This is where Im stuck in,
the saa716x code wasnt writen by me, the original authors dont seem to have much interest in pushing it to v4l, NXP has no interest in even talking to me, the product is discontinued and the IP is sold to a now bankrupt company, their lawyers obv have no interest in me as they cant make any money off me. So how does someone like me get the saa716x code pushed to v4l ? alot of my patch's are based off that driver, without that the cards wont work.
next issue is alot of v4l's api's are bloody old and nasty. So instead of dealing with alot of the crap the v4l wants me to use, I just changed things to make more sense and functional. Problem is this breaks userland applications until they are recompiled against my tree. Linux kernel maintainers are so anti break userland that they resist core changes to the extreme and the api stays crap forever.
want examples?
- dvb_demux has fixed 188 packet sizes hardcoded in, with no way to easily change them on the fly based on system
- fe_caps hold every bloody possible thing you could think of with a max of 32 items? thats retarded
- why was there a delsys but not delmod or delfec?
- why is there a FEC_NONE and SYS_UNDEFINED but not one for modulation?
Id love to get some of my patch's upstream, but its not a friendly road.
UDL
TBS6925/5980, Prof 7301/7500/8000, Genpix Skywalker-1, Skystar 2 Express HD
Hauppauge 950Q, Kworld 330U/435v3/445v3
Dreambox 800
I use Linux and support open source projects.