Dear Fedora Community, what do you want?

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 10:52:23AM -0500, Scott Sloan wrote:
> "Give me a list of what the Linux community is seeking as far as
> hardware support and I'll see if I can get some bodies working on it.
> With a convincing email or two and we should be able to get it done"

> like to write the email just to get the issue out there. so I'm asking
> What do we want from manufactures? Just great stable drivers? GPL
> drivers? And How can we convince them that writing drivers for Linux is
> worth their time? 

It depends on the vendor and how they perceive their market and product.

If they see Linux as a market that justifies their own investment, engineering
and full support then its useful to be able to build relationships between
vendors and the relevant community people before they reinvent the wheel and
so we can help them do the Linux bits of the job better.

If they see no secrets in the interface to their hardware then throwing manuals
over the wall to the right people can work very well. Some vendors are doing
this routinely, others only to selected people. (And one or two have submitted
their own drivers as non-company things to avoid any support assumptions 8)).
A great way to test the water here is if people want Linux support for an older
"uninteresting" to the vendor product because it carries little risk and lets
people test the water.

Where it gets hairy is when the vendor is worried about the hardware being
cloned or has what they perceive to be very clever stuff at the hardware
interface layer, or in software just above it. Nvidia have this problem - they
have some rather neat DMA interfaces and context handling (which people have
nowdays mostly reverse engineered), and a rather good implementation of GL.
That to them is a sustainable competetive advantage so not something they are
going to casually give out. This is where it generally gets fun - can you
provide some docs, or NDA'd documentation that is sufficient to get good 
maintainable drivers. 

I'd also say - don't overlook the possibility that for a given piece of hardware
nobody is interested in Linux support. Sometimes it happens and you can throw
all the manuals over the wall and nobody cares. It depends what interest
customers show (and a little google research can be informative too). 

There can also be advantages in having Linux support - Linux is growing and there
are sometimes first mover advantages in being the vendor that can say "Yes our
hardware works with Windows and Linux". That varies by product and how things
fit together - the classic case where it is critical is enterprise backup tools.

<General lecture mode>

I'd say the most important part of all is relationship building - that means
being able to appreciate both sides, to understand how you find something that
generates value for both sides, and the willingness to be completely honest when
you can't. If Linux support makes no sense now - say so. When you come back in
two years and the market has changed the honesty then will have earned you 
respect. If you lied before then you may harm the whole vendor and Linux
relationship when it does make sense.

</Lecture>


Alan