The Sad Story of the em28xx Driver

“A quick review of some of the history is in order here. Markus
was one of the authors of the original em28xx driver, first merged
for the 2.6.15 kernel. His efforts to enhance that driver quickly
ran into trouble, though, when he tried to make substantial changes
to the low-level tuner interface – changes which affected a number
of other drivers. These changes were not popular in the Video4Linux
community, and there were fears that they could break unrelated
drivers. So this code was not merged.

“In response to this rejection, Markus claimed ownership of the
em28xx driver and asked that it be removed from the mainline
kernel. He then continued development of the code, hosting it on
his own server. There was even a period where the code was
relicensed to the MPL, apparently as part of an attempt to prevent
it from being taken into the mainline. Eventually, Markus came back
with a new approach which moved much of the tuner code into user
space. That solution, too, failed to pass review; nobody else could
really see much advantage in moving that much driver code out of
the kernel. The fact that Markus clearly intended to have some of
that code appear in the form of binary-only blobs did not help his
case. So the user-space approach, like its predecessor, was not
merged.”

Complete Story