6 Nov
2006
6 Nov
'06
8:29 p.m.
Paul Davis wrote:
Hannu was the guy who made sound on linux possible in
the first place.
Have a little respect. OK, so he and others decided to try to make a
business out of it, and they bowed down to NDA requirements from vendors
as part of doing that. Many of us never liked the results of that
decision, but its an understandable and, from some points of view, a
defensible one too.
NDAs are not all bad. I signed an NDA with creative, and the result is
better support for open source drivers for Audigy and E-MU cards. I
choose the GPL license for my code, but I could have chosen any other
license I wanted.
I am not allowed to copy the datasheets themselves, but I can write
anything I like in the source code. I.e. comments etc.
So, I don't believe the argument that signing NDAs requires closed
source drivers.
James
P.S. For those interested, there is now an ALSA driver for the E-MU
1212m and E-MU 1820m.