Let's Kill All Proprietary Drivers For Good
Channel: Luis Chamberlain
Date: 2012-05-03

Proprietary drivers have a long history and tradition which has been imposed upon the industry by archaic driver development models and Operating System Vendor requirements. Licensing drivers in a clean way to share with Linux and the BSD families had typically been done under the confusing Dual BSD/GPL tradition. With the 'ath5k wars' and the involvement of the SFLC we've learned a few things to help clarify this and accomplish this in a clean way, but as new driver development continues one of the biggest issues observed is quality of software with proprietary software development models. What are these issues, and how do we fix them? A Linux and FreeBSD developer propose to kill all notions of proprietary drivers practices in the industry for good, not only for Linux, but for all Operating Systems. We'll review how we plan on doing this and would like feedback from the community.

Luis R. Rodriguez, Qualcomm Atheros

Luis is a kernel developer at Qualcomm. Luis started hacking on the kernel since the 2.6.5 release and his main focus has been wireless. Today his focus is on helping guide Qualcomm Atheros with upstream strategies and helping other engineers contribute upstream properly.

Adrian Chadd, Qualcomm Atheros

Adrian is a FreeBSD developer recently hired by Qualcomm. Adrian is the FreeBSD net80211 and Atheros driver maintainer. Adrian has been hacking on FreeBSD for 12 years now

Slides available at:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jam4v4MZ-fnVxA9-VmnQYd5Z4_Qqp-GP9_GSw0SyU7M/edit

This video is originally hosted at:

https://video.linux.com/videos/lets-kill-all-proprietary-drivers-for-good

This was recorded as part of the 2012 Linux Collaboration Summit. Thanks to the Linux Foundation for letting me post this here.

First attempt to do this:

https://github.com/mcgrof/alx