“A recent attempt to push some V4L/DVB updates for inclusion in
the 2.6.24 Linux kernel met with some resistance. Linus Torvalds
summarized the problems affecting the em28xx video driver:“‘I’ve talked to various people, and none of the main kernel
people end up being at all interested in a kernel that has external
dependencies on binary blobs for tuners.“‘So right now it seems like while I would personally want to
have more vendors supprt their own drivers, if that in this case
means that we’d have to have user-space and unmaintainable binaries
to tune the cards, everybody seems to hate that idea…'”