Re: userspace drivers

[Jeff Bailey]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 05:00:32PM +0100, Robert Millan wrote:

> > What's official? =) I suspect that drivers will never all be copyrighted
> > to the FSF, since there's almost no value in that, which means that they
> > should never wind up in the Hurd repository.  On the other hand, having
> > a sub project that deals with drivers and driver infrastracture would be
> > very worthwhile.

> do you mean the Hurd repository is not their place? when the Hurd runs on L4
> it will certainly need userspace drivers..

Of course it will, but that doesn't mean that the Hurd repository is the
right place for them.  Almost all of the code in the Hurd repository
(with some notable exceptions, like some CMU code that's still around
and the pfinet server) has had its copyright assigned the the FSF.  This
makes it easier to defend in court.

Most of the drivers probably won't have their copyrights assigned.  That
might make it problematic to include them in the main Hurd tree.

There's also the side problem that the Linux kernel contains hundreds
(thousands?) of drivers that any given person isn't going to need.  I
think that having the drivers in a separate repository (and then
possibly in a collection of different modules, depending on
arch/need/etc) is probably nicer anyway to keep the amount that one
needs to download to a minimum.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey