Hey guys I'm at work,
Neat thing about this is, I saw Creative advertising about jobs for Linux
coders on a Internet Job Websight. They might already be looking into the
designing of the libaries already. I know that IBM is leaning alot of weight
on the peripherals industry to build drivers so that they can start shipping or
currently ship Red Hat to the home market. I know they already do it on the
server side.
Later,
Big Mike
Nolan Darilek wrote:
> I had an idea for a possible mini-project and wanted to toss it out
> for discussion, since I'm not really involved in SIGLinux (with the
> exception of posting questions here) at the moment, and really don't
> know if there are currently any resources/interests in creating such a
> project.
>
> I bought an SBLive last May, and have been very happy with it. I can
> load win98 and watch DVD's with surround sound, and windows games seem
> to sound much better. Creative also has a Linux binary-only SBLive!
> driver which, though it doesn't support four-point surround, allows me
> to use my card like an SB16.
>
> I was somewhat happy with this solution for months. Even though I
> didn't really like the fact that the drivers were closed-source, and
> that I can't use Debian's /etc/modules to load the driver under 2.2.12
> since it's built for 2.2.10, I could at least play MP3's, CDs and
> games. For the past few days, though, I've been considering testing
> out the Hurd. Since this driver is a Linux kernel module, I'd be
> giving up sound under the Hurd, and thus I probably won't have very
> long uptimes because my box is my stereo, TV, etc. Plus, the release
> cycles on the existing driver are terribly slow; the only change I
> perceived in the last release which was months ago was the renaming of
> the module to emu10k1 instead of sblive. My two rear speakers don't
> even work under Linux.
>
> So, I was considering helping to draft a petition to try to convince
> Creative to make their driver development efforts open source. Then,
> the SBLive driver could be moved into ALSA, which I think runs under
> the Hurd. Furthermore, it probably wouldn't be difficult to support
> the SBLive under *BSD, if it isn't already.
>
> First, though, I'm planning on emailing the developers of the current
> driver. Maybe they have some weird plan to GPL the drivers later,
> though this makes no sense at all. :) I'd just like to understand
> their motives for releasing a binary-only module as opposed to source
> -- whether they're restricted by NDA, or whatnot.
>
> Would anyone be interested in helping with such a project? For one
> thing, I'm really not sure how to write a petition. I can use the ATI
> petition as a framework, and could probably put something good
> together, but I'm sure some of you have better writing skills than I
> do. Plus, I tend to ramble, much like I'm doing now, and would
> probably end up with a long argument in favor of GPLing the drivers,
> instead of a short petition. :)
>
> Second, and I'm not even sure if such a thing exists, if a petition is
> written, we'd need to find a server which could survive, or at least
> limp past, the Slashdot effect. I'm not sure how popular this will be,
> or if anyone even cares, but it's best to be prepared just in case. I
> normally host pages on my box, but I really don't want to test
> Resnet's slashdotability, so to speak. :)
>
> I probably should have addressed this concern of mine initially, but
> would a petition be a very significant incentive for a company? I've
> used the ATI petition as an example because I had been monitoring that
> effort, and was glad that it received a response since I was
> practically given an ATI All In Wonder card and really wanted to use
> it. But, I'm sure that a number of petitions aren't even noticed by
> companies. If this is the case, then there probably wouldn't be a
> point in taking the time to draft a petition. On the other hand, if at
> least some of these petitions are successful, I feel that the effort
> might be worth the time investment.
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