[vox-tech] Conexant (Rockwell) winmodems

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Larry Ozeran (lozeran@clinicalinformatics.com):

> <informational part>
> It looks like Conexant has finally decided to cooperate with the Linux
> community to develop drivers for their winmodems. Their efforts can be
> found at:
> http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv/index.html#about

Hoping not to rain on your parade, but this isn't all that new -- nor,
unfortunately, is it all that good.  Conexant is _not_ cooperating with 
development of open-sourced drivers.  Not in the least.  

Here's the thing:  The companies that released proprietary kernel
drivers for Linux found over time that kernel programming interfaces
change -- and the kernel team have no plans to prevent this.
Accordingly, the first generation of (proprietary) winmodem drivers
weren't very successful.  That was Plan A.

Plan B is thus to retain all the "secret sauce" hardware-specific code in
a binary-only, proprietary core module, surrounded by a thin open-source
layer of glue code that they hope the community will keep in sync with
the kernel's driver interface.

Obviously, each coder in the community will make up his own mind about
this, but I personally think it's... not a worthwhile expense of time
and effort.  If Conexant were serious about involving the open-source
community, it would assist genuinely open-source driver projects.

After all, IBM did for MWave modems!  http://www-124.ibm.com/acpmodem/

And there are also independently written open-source drivers for Lucent
LT and Ambient / Cirrus Logic winmodems (http://www.linmodems.org/). 

-- 
Cheers,   "This is mad, egotistical, sick, twisted, and stretches the bounds of
Rick Moen   good taste right off the tongue, past the uvula, and down around 
rick@linuxmafia.com      the duodenum.  It has other merits, but that should 
           indicate positive interest."  -- The Cube, http://www.forum3000.org/