From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S266837AbUH0SN1 (ORCPT ); Fri, 27 Aug 2004 14:13:27 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S266838AbUH0SN1 (ORCPT ); Fri, 27 Aug 2004 14:13:27 -0400 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:39649 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S266837AbUH0SNV (ORCPT ); Fri, 27 Aug 2004 14:13:21 -0400 Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 11:13:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Xavier Bestel cc: Christoph Hellwig , Craig Milo Rogers , Kernel Mailing List , webcam@smcc.demon.nl Subject: Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc) In-Reply-To: <1093628254.15313.14.camel@gonzales> Message-ID: References: <20040826233244.GA1284@isi.edu> <20040827004757.A26095@infradead.org> <20040827094346.B29407@infradead.org> <1093628254.15313.14.camel@gonzales> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Xavier Bestel wrote: > > What if someone steps up and want to maintain and extend this piece of > code ? Will you forbid him (as in "not in my tree") ? I'd suggest you contact the people who have worked on that driver (there's certainly people outside of nemosoft, at least according to the changelogs) and see what they feel like and try to gauge how much they were part of driver development. I'd _really_ prefer not to step on original authors toes. Quite frankly, the best option is for people who love the driver to plead with the author(s). It's totally pointless to flame him/them, that will just irritate them and make them less likely to be inclined to say "sure, go ahead and maintain the old driver". But Greg is right - we don't keep hooks that are there purely for binary drivers. If somebody wants a binary driver, it had better be a whole independent thing - and it won't be distributed with the kernel. Linus