In the early Linux days - more than a decade ago - it was normal to have completely public technical reference manuals for the silicon, enabling Linux community developers to write drivers for the chips.
After chip design houses start to realize there is an economically significant Linux market, they try to use their existing workflow, processes and development model for proprietary operating systems and try to apply this to Linux. The results are in many cases binary-only drivers for certain kernel versions and/or distributions or unmaintained, non-portable, coding style incompliant open source drivers for outdated kernel versions. Those kind of drivers are bound to create dissatisfaction within the Free Software developer community, among the Free Software users. Furthermore, they also result in inefficient use of R&D resources both inside and outside the chip vendor.
Many silicon design houses still don't understand the Free Software and particularly Linux development model at all. This results in suboptimal support of their hardware products. In the end, customers are likely to buy from a different vendor.
So what can chip design houses do to ensure excellent support of their products in the Free Software world?
Harald Welte is a freelancer, consultant, enthusiast, freedom fighter and hacker who is working with Free Software (and particularly the Linux kernel) since 1995.
His first major code contribution to the kernel was within the netfilter/iptables packet filter.
He has started a number of other Free Software and Free Hardware projects, mainly related to RFID such as librfid, OpenMRTD, OpenBeacon, OpenPCD, OpenPICC.
During 2006 and 2007 Harald became the co-founder of OpenMoko, where he served as Lead System Architect for the worlds first 100% Open Free Software based mobile phone.
Aside from his technical contributions, Harald has been pioneering the legal enforcement of the GNU GPL license as part of his gpl-violations.org project. More than 150 inappropriate use of GPL licensed code by commercial companies have been resolved as part of this effort, both in court and out of court. He has received the 2007 'FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software' and the "2008 Google/O'Reilly Open Source award: Defender of Rights".
Harald is currently working as "Open Source Liaison" for the Taiwanese CPU, chipset and peripheral design house VIA, helping them to understand how to attain the best possible Free Software support for their components.
He continues to operate his consulting business hmw-consulting.
