Qualcomm Clarifies Killing Proprietary Drivers

Qualcomm has clarified their views today regarding the presentation of two of their Atheros developers proposing that all proprietary drivers be killed for good across all platforms and replaced with open-source drivers.

On Thursday I wrote about the presentation that's slated for next week's Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit by Luis R. Rodriguez and Adrian Chadd of Qualcomm Atheros that is titled Let's Kill All Proprietary Drivers For Good. The aforelinked article talked about their ambitions that would affect all operating systems -- Linux, BSD, Windows, etc. They want to do away with proprietary drivers entirely and make them open-source. Linked to from the article was also their slides for next week.

Unfortunately, Qualcomm doesn't share the same views at this point. I was contacted this afternoon by Qualcomm Atheros PR's Trisha Rule that "Unfortunately, none of this content was approved and/or reviewed by the Qualcomm legal department. We kindly request to remove the post from your website."

In communicating with her, the two Atheros engineers will be presenting the views as their own. We've settled for clarifying the article. The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit schedule has already been updated with a differing link to their presentation slides. Now the link is pointing to a Google Docs page disclaiming the slides as their own personal views, etc.

So if you were hoping Qualcomm would soon have some landmark open-source announcement, it unfortunately doesn't look that way at all. Oh well, at least there's other good Linux news coming out today.