Note that UDI has been around for years --- companies have been working
on this since 1993. Hence, in a long-running project like this, almost
everybody will have slightly different visions about what its goals are
and what they hope to achieve.
Quite frankly, I don't understand the comments in the press release
about their hoping that the Linux community will provide UDI drivers for
all of these devices. That simply doesn't make any sense; a native
driver will be faster, more efficient, and in all likelihood, easier to
implement. And whether you write a UDI driver or a native driver, you
still need the cooperation of the manufacturer to give you programming
specs.
What's much more likely to happen is that hardware manufacturers will
start shipping UDI drivers with their hardware, and that will allow them
to ship, say, Winmodem cards that will actually work on operating
systems other than Windows 95. (Winmodems currently don't even work
under NT).
Given that scenario, my personal take is that UDI is relatively
harmless. But before we start send a formal response, we should make
some informal contacts first. And one of the first questions I would
ask is a fuller explanation of their vision about the Linux community
providing UDI drivers. What they've written in their press release
simply doesn't make any sense. (But that's most likely a failure by
some marketing dweeb who was writing the press release than evidence of
something dirty and underhanded. "Never ascribe to malice what can be
adequately ascribed to stupidity.")
- Ted
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