Re: [GnomeMeeting-list] Philips camera support discontinued?

[Conrad Beckert <conrad_b yahoo com>]

The situation is completely nuts as Philips cameras
are the most widespread ones - at least here in
Germany. Our big electronics retailers - Mediamarkt
and Saturn  - have virtually only Philips cams and
definitely not supported Logitechs etc. on stock.

That excludes a lot of people from videoconferencing -
in my opinion the most widespread webcam application.
I have a Philips webcam too - recently upgraded so I
couldn't justify before myself buying an other model.

The problem seems philosophic - and the Kernel
maintainers seem (at least as I can conclude from what
I've read) behave in a fundamendalistic way. On the
other hand, offendedly redrawing from the scene and
locking oneself in the bathroom doesn't help either.

As it is now, everyone - except the Evel Guy From
Redmond (TM) - looses. The reputation of Linux as a
system that provides freedom for it's users, suffers.

Without getting into the discussion of free, "libre"
...: I used to have the freedom to have my videophone
on Linux with my Philips cam - and now it is gone.
This kind of things I usually attribute to closed shop
products. (not even Windows would do that)

Probably - we here in the Gnomemeeting forum - should
find a solution. Someone (I would try - please help)
should convince both the Kernel crowds and the driver
developer (forgot his name, sorry) to get back to
table.

I could imagine a compromise:
- The kernel gets both driver (pwc and pwcx) and (non
standard) hooks back for the time beeing.
- For the next version (2.8 or whatever) a standard,
well documented way of including closed source drivers
into the kernel should be developed and communicated
well to the community. That interface should be
generic enough to accomodate anything (perhaps it
exists yet)
- The pwc driver should be converted to this new
interface standard
- Meanwhile pwc should be available as it is.

Any ideas?

Conrad

> The kernel provides an interface where modules can
> hook ; a quite
> generic interface, that is used by all modules
> (libre or not). The libre
> pwc module creates its own hooking interface, just
> for the non-libre
> pwcx: there is code in a GPL module that is there to
> enable a non-libre
> module, and only that module.
>  


	

	
		
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