Some weeks ago, Greg Kroah-Hartmann pushed an offer to manufacturers to write free drivers of their devices for Linux. He offers them “Linux compliance” for the necessary information to write the driver. The fire began at once when Greg mentioned the possibility of agreement with some kinds of NDAs (Non-Disclosure Acts).
I think some pragmatism is not bad in the free sofware world. But I understand accepting any kind of NDA can help to work Linux on the X device properly today, but it doesn’t solves the problem of making work on the X device V2 in the future. It minimizes the pressure on the manufacturers to open the specifications of the devices and, as Theo de Raat explained unpleasantly, these agreements not only doesn’t help to the other free operating systems, they also harm them.
As steel manufacturers must provide their beams specifications to allow to the civil engineer build properly with them, network, printer and more devices manufacturers must provide their own products specifications to allow to programmers make work properly.
At this point, we must remember the free software movement began because a NDA that doesn’t allow RMS fix a bug in a printer driver.
You can read the FAQ of the initiative and most interesting messages of the openbsd-misc list thread in KernelTrap.