Days after a DRM driver developer orphaned his drivers due to health reasons in stepping down, the sole maintainer at large of the Linux wireless (WiFi) drivers is stepping down and without any immediate replacement.
Kalle Valo who has been a Qualcomm Atheros engineer for more than the past decade and contributor to the Linux kernel since 2008 during the Linux 2.6 kernel days has decided to step down. Kalle announced this week on the Linux wireless mailing list:
“I’m stepping down from al
10 Comments
FirmwareBurner
What's the solution to such high bus factors in Linux drivers? How do we encourage more devs to contribute?
_fw
I’ll never forget the day my laptop Wi-Fi worked on Linux. I was a teenager and it was my first machine and I’d been dying to Ubuntu to break free from the grasp of Windows 7.
Wi-Fi was a dealbreaker because it was a laptop and it was my only machine. I remember one day booting in the latest live CD that Canonical had sent (way back when you could get them delivered by post), switch on my laptop and seeing those SSIDs appear.
It honestly felt like magic, and I’ll never forget it. Something as mundane as working WiFi drivers on a basic spec Vaio quite literally changed my life, by allowing me to run Linux natively with a web connection. That opened many doors to me later in life.
Forever grateful for that work.
colesantiago
At some point we are going to have a conversation when AI is going to contribute to the Linux kernel.
Especially since this was the only maintainer of the Wifi driver.
We aren't going to like it but it is inevitable sooner or later.
relistan
Shout out to all the folks doing tireless work to maintain the kernel and its drivers, and the rest of the open ecosystem. You are all heroes.
5jasgfQ287G
De facto corporate projects lose their attraction for new people, so it's no wonder that no new maintainer has stepped up.
Corporate projects are not true free software. Contributing means that you deal with the OSS inner circle and the more powerful corporate inner circle.
Another reason is that people who produce real software are treated like garbage, especially if it is written in C. The "they trust me, dumb fucks" web developers rule over real software engineers.
5jasgfQ287G
Those were great times when WiFi started working. My card worked first on OpenBSD and soon after on Linux. Nice work from all of you.
blacklion
WiFi is cursed in OSS.
FreeBSD always has from 0 to 1 WiFi maintainer. All of them were very talented and productive (Søren Schmidt, Adrian Chadd and Bjoern A. Zeeb among others!), but it is too complex and vast area to work alone. Especially beginning from 802.11n and beyond.
donatj
I have painful memories the days of trying to get NDISwrapper working so I could use the Windows XP driver for my 2005 Dell Latitude in Ubuntu.
I am guessing wrapping Windows drivers isn't really a thing anymore? I guess my naive question is really just could that be a more sustainable solution long term?
molticrystal
This is a bit sad. In an attempt to be optimistic, I believe openwrt tries to focus on a LTS kernels and there is a lot of cross over but it would be great if this led to both having even tighter integration.
Ragnarork
A painful reminder as it is, that for many projects / components in the open ecosystem, there are very few if not a single person actually keeping it alive, maintained, and updated.
Mandatory: https://xkcd.com/2347/