[OpenWrt-Devel] Why OpenWrt sucks?

[David Lang]

On Tue, 10 Mar 2015, valent.turkovic at gmail.com wrote:

> Can anyone explain to me how NDAs come into this? Because I remember
> one discussions with Mikrotik developer who said that they can't
> release their Atheros driver that they developed as open source
> because they signed NDA with Atheros?
>
> Is Atheros giving some "secret" and proprietary information to
> companies that sign NDA with them? If this is true then we will never
> have as fast performance as companies that sign NDAs.

Depending on the wording of the NDA, it may be (and frequently has been) 
possible to write open drivers after signing the NDA. It does limit a bit what 
you can explain in the comments in the drivers.

In some cases (I believe a minority) the NDA prevents you from releasing the 
driver because the fact that it can get the hardware to do things is deemed 
'secret' by the manufacturer.

There are a lot of things in Linux that have been developed by developers who 
have signed NDAs to get access to the detailed specs and access to developers.

David Lang
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