the corner office

An interesting bit of controversy in Linux-land. A disagreement between the author of driver code for a family of Philips webcams and a kernel maintainer has resulted in the driver author insisting that his code be removed from the Linux kernel.

The story is well covered at Kerneltrap. Two things strike me though. The first is that Linus Torvalds insisted that the kernel maintainers do the right thing and respect this person's wishes to have his code removed from the kernel, even though as GPL'd software, they'd be legally entitled to keep using the code. Not an easy decision (see below), but it's nice to see people being honourable instead of hiding behind the legalities, for their own benefit.

The other issue is that this is a case where the "rules" (this rule being that no special-purpose hooks are allowed in the kernel for non-open-source modules) actually appear to be hurting people, ie everyday Linux users. Many of them invested in these webcams because they were supported under Linux, and that's no longer the case. The argument is often raised that some kernel developers are unreasonably zealous in their refusal to deal with proprietary modules in the Linux kernel. The pragmatic angle though, is that these people spend a large part of their lives working with, understanding and debugging the Linux kernel. When proprietary modules come along, the process of debugging falls apart because there is then potentially broken code which the kernel developers can't see. Hence the rules. That's hardly unreasonable, but shouldn't these rules be fudged occasionally, perhaps, in order to make it easier to spread the Linux gospel? Tough call...