Possibly offtopic : Binary only driver

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 14:21 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 12:22:29 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > because that stiffles innovation for too much.
> 
> Stability is about managing change, not preventing it.
> 
> <rant>
> 
> Unfortunately the kernel developers routinely conflate the two. There are
> plenty of innovative programs with clean code that nonetheless provide
> stable interfaces. For some reason some people believe the kernel is
> special and the rules that apply to the rest of the platform (glibc, gtk,
> X protocol etc) don't apply to them.

actually we do. We keep our *designed* interface to userspace rather
constant and stable.

That is not the same as the *internal* design of the kernel. That we
keep changing and improving all the time. And that's fine, that is why
we have (almost) all drivers in the main tarbal/rpm and.. well.. the
rest is required to be GPL anyway in principle so can be adjusted.
At least that's the intention. Some people think they can get away with
not being GPL while still using and depending on deep kernel internals;
well... to be honest the pain is on them though.

As for your comparison to X, glibc, gtk etc, those EXTERNAL interfaces
remain stable, just like the kernel external interface is. But those
projects do change the internal interfaces a lot.. just they don't allow
anyone to see it, unlike the kernel where modules do get to see it.

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