Re: /usr/include/linux and stuff

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Al" == Al Hudson <eah106 [at] york.ac.uk> writes:

    Al> On Fri, 18 Feb 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

    Al> Dunno about cardmgr, that might be too userland, but certainly
    Al> I was under the impression 60-70% of the work is done in the
    Al> kernel now?
    >> What work?

    Al> I was under the impression that pcmcia support was now folded
    Al> into the kernel?

I haven't heard anything about a complete "clean-room"
reimplementation of PCMCIA Card Services for 2.3.x, and as of 3 months
ago the pcmcia-cs license was MozPL-like, so PCMCIA cannot be legally
incorporated into the kernel except as a module.  (GPL can't tolerate
it.  And even the modules are illegal under RMS's interpretation of
the GPL, since dynamic linking doesn't exempt you from the viral
clause.  I think Linus encourages them, and RMS had to swallow it---I
heard Linus was ready to release Linux under something other than GPL,
but the source is pretty unreliable, and Linus does believe in the
GPL---muttering something about "standard part of the OS" a la the
Motif exception.)

It is true that most drivers need little change and the people who
support the drivers do the PCMCIA additions themselves, but
pcmcia_core, cs, ds, the bridge support, and the userland utilities
(cardmgr, cardctl, and cardinfo) are all still maintained by Hinds.
And I don't really think it's fair to characterize device drivers as
"part of PCMCIA", that would be like saying the aic7xxx driver is part
of PCMCIA (or PCI or MCA or any of the other half-dozen bus
architectures it supports).

But I don't use 2.3.x yet, so I could be wrong about current
development practices.  I think it would be silly, though, to throw
away an excellent free PCMCIA implementation on religious grounds.

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