[ Thanks to LinuxNews.com for this link.
]
“Prompting Dutch electronics superpower Philips into the
Open Source arena is one thing. Convincing it to give would-be
Linux developers a chance to bring its products up-to-speed with
the Linux Community without signing a non-disclosure agreement
(NDA) is quite another.”
“Robert van der Meulen of Netherlands-based Cistron Internet
Services also has taken measures to get to the bottom of the issue.
“We have some Philips USB Web cams, and wanted them to run with
Linux. We didn’t want to sign an NDA, so we got the binary driver
from Nemosoft, and started working on disassembling it. The result
is a (very preliminary, alpha-stage) driver in source code, and a
specifications document (specs). The driver works, but is alpha;
the documentation is fairly complete, except for the compression
part,” he said following Vreeken’s request for mail messages.”
“Cistron, he said, is a Linux-minded Internet service provider
(ISP) that would like to involve more community members to the
project while avoiding the NDA. “As a response to the NDA post we’d
like to release both the driver and the source to the public, and
see what the community can come up with. Of course we’re going to
work with the community on the new to-be GPL driver. The
documentation and source can be found here.”