Novell sponsors free driver development for Linux
Posted on by Ruiwen
Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of the leading Linux kernel hackers has announced on his blog that his employer, Novell, has moved him to work full-time on a project he announced back in January this year to help device manufacturers write free Linux drivers for their devices, so long as they provided the device specifications.
As Kroah-Hartman noted, after putting up his offer,
It turns out that there were two large groups of people who responded to the announcement, companies wanting drivers, and developers wanting to help out.He was unable to cope with the workload, trying to juggle a full-time job and hacking the kernel on the side.
However, Novell recently modified his postion at work to allow Kroah-Hartman to work full time on the project, which will hopefully lead to more drivers being developed for Linux. Kroah-Hartman is the kernel maintainer for the PCI, USB, I²C, driver core and the sysfs kernel subsystems, according to his Wikipedia entry.
For more information, check out the official kick-off announcement and the Linux Driver Project Wiki.
We say, “Well Done, Novell!”, and all the best Greg!