[vox-tech] Conexant (Rockwell) winmodems

[Larry Ozeran]

Rick --

Thanks for your comments. I have been to linmodem before and I was never
able to get any of the drivers there to work. The drivers at the site I
listed, did work. That was news for me, and hopefully useful for others
with Conexant chips.

You are right about the embedded proprietary piece (that is clearly noted
at the site). From my perspective, it is still a level of cooperation from
Conexant that didn't exist before.

-- Larry

At 11:39 PM 9/11/02 -0700, you wrote:
>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/
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