Way back in January, I announced a program to write Linux drivers for companies for free. When I did that, I never expected the response to be as large as it was.

It turns out that there were two large groups of people who responded to the announcement, companies wanting drivers, and developers wanting to help out.

I never imagined that so many different people would offer to help out. There is a real need for a place where developers can find a "real" project to work on in the Linux kernel. The Kernel Janitors project is a great place to start out, but what to do from there? It turns out that over 100 different developers offered up their services. Clearly this was a huge untapped group of talented people who wanted to help out.

Also, the number of companies expressing interest in this has exceeded all of my wildest expectations. Already this announcement has caused a number of drivers to end up in the main Linux kernel source tree, with more in the pipeline.

But unfortunately, I was not able to handle all of these different developers and company requests on my own. I had a full-time job, and a full part-time hobby doing Linux kernel development. These requests ended up going unanswered, and I sincerely apologize for that.

Now this has all changed.

My employer, Novell, has modified my position to now allow me to work full time on this project. Namely getting more new Linux kernel drivers written, for free, for any company that so desires. And to help manage all of the developers and project managers who want to help out.

We have kicked off the project again with this announcement on the mailing list set up for the developers wishing to help out.

If you want to join this group of people, or are a company wanting a free Linux driver written for them, please see our new web page at:

http://www.linuxdriverproject.org/

and follow the instructions there on how to join in.

I can't thank the people who have helped make this possible at Novell enough. They really care about helping make Linux support as many devices as possible, with fully opensource drivers.

Now let's get busy writing code...

posted Thu, 27 Sep 2007 in [/linux]


   



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