Get your free device drivers here!

Free Linux Driver Development! - linux kernel monkey log

Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to do.

All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email, but if necessary, that can be done.

In return, you will receive a complete and working Linux driver that is added to the main Linux kernel source tree. The driver will be written by some of the members of the Linux kernel developer community (over 1500 strong and growing). This driver will then be automatically included in all Linux distributions, including the "enterprise" ones. It will be automatically kept up to date and working through all Linux kernel API changes. This driver will work with all of the different CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.

[...]

This offer is in effect for all different types of devices, from USB toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards. If you manufacture it, we can get Linux drivers working for it.

This could, ultimately, be very big. It's certainly a good way to save your development group a lot of trouble. (From Groklaw.)

Don't let your Vista box talk to itself!

» Vista Speech Command exposes remote exploit | George Ou | ZDNet.com
The latest bit of entertainment from Microsoft is that if you have speech recognition turned on in Vista, your computer will blythly listen to whatever comes out of its own speakers. So you can create a sound file or a movie, put it on a website, and give commands to the computer of anyone stupid enough to be running Vista and speech recognition when they listen to it.

I'm waiting for somebody to combine this with Goodbye-Microsoft.com. There's a song in there somewhere, I fancy.

(From techdirt.com; spotted by mr_kurt.)