Because the good people in this mailing list are keeping them honest.
Give any board or silicon company the ability to protect their IP, even
in the smallest way and they'll do it, and for no good technical reason.
It's a cut throat market and it's not clear that everyone understands
just how thin sales margins really are.
That means Hauppauge potentially releasing a binary driver, because it's
much easier than seeking silicon vendor permission for a public diver.
The net result of that would mean I'd have to leave the company and find
another company that practices the one thing I truly care about ....
open source and open development groups.
I'm keeping Hauppauge honest with their Linux involvement and I'm not
alone. Other devs in other linux subsystems in other companies are doing
the same thing.
Binary drivers (or binary components) leads Linux back in time.
I can't believe your so passionate about protecting secrets.
Why would a company want to do that? Companies don't do that, hackers do
that.
It seems perfectly valid to me.
The kernel has no good API for those, each new type of video device and
suggested API is judged on it's own merits and discussed on the mailing
lists.
Those are not my problem and I don't use them, you should raise that
with the relevant usb-dev mailing lists. I'm here because I care about
linuxtv. Please stay on topic.
Just because AMD or INTEL want to invent some whizzy new technology it
doesn't say anything about the TV card development and retail business.
Intel and AMD have teams of Linux engineers helping operating system
developers bring their ideas and technologies to new platforms. That's a
million miles away from any of the TV board vendors I know of, who have
little or NO fulltime linux developers and consider the < 5% market
fringe at best.
Markus, senior devs in the LinuxTV group are telling you, based on their
commercial experience, that userspace access is technically great, but
long term it will be used against the community and will ultimately hurt
linuxtv development.
If you want to reply and have the last word, go ahead, but repeating
what I've said on this list in the past - I'll never support the
userland tuning/demod idea.
I wanted to work directly with you on the em28xx tree, helping you
remove the 5% of code that Johannes referred to, but you said no. I
wanted to help you make the tree conform to the linuxtv standards for
frameworks, you said no.
If you care about LinuxTV you'll work with the core subsystem developers
to bring your em28xx tree inline. If you don't care then why are you here?
- Steve
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