There was a lot of very good press coverage over my last announcement of the restart of the Linux Driver Project and my involvement in it now full time. It's been a few weeks since that announcement, and we now have over 300 different developers signed up to help create, and maintain Linux drivers!

I've also posted a short status report about the current projects, and what is going on with them. Since then, one more project has started, and there are a handful still in the planning stage.

What we need now is more companies participating in the project, we have the developers, but not enough work to keep them busy.

So how do we change this? I'm thinking that possibly, there really isn't a large number of different devices out there that need Linux support written for them.

As proof of this, I give you the Linux Foundation's Vendor Advisory Board. This group of companies publish a list of priorities that they feel need to be worked on in order to help Linux succeed.

Coming in at number 3 is "Device Driver Support". So, I approached this group and asked them specifically what devices did they see in common use that are not supported by Linux (the obvious 2 video cards being a known exception.) Despite this being such a high priority for this group, they had no examples to provide.

And neither do I. I don't currently know of any common piece of hardware in use today that is not supported on Linux. And since these vendors do not know, and I don't, I'm asking the world to help out.

So, please, let me know what specific type of device you know of that is not properly supported on Linux. If you want, please mark up the wiki page at:

http://linuxdriverproject.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DriversNeeded

Or just email me with your recommendations. If patterns emerge, I'll approach the companies and ask them if they will work with us.

Hopefully with your help, we can find some work for these 310 developers to do :)

posted Mon, 22 Oct 2007 in [/linux]