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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> The answer was as unhelpful as possible

Looking at the answer, I wouldn't call it unhelpful. They were planning to release a source for the library that would essentially implement all the needed data interfaces? That's more than helpful and at least they responded.

I tried contacting Nuvoton for example about their documentation for some of their super I/O chips which lack Linux support (they do document a bunch of their chips pretty well, but for some weird reason not all).

Not only I got no details, I literally didn't even get a response from them at all. So above case is hugely better.

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Go through the Linux Foundation, they have a process for accessing docs for drivers that vendors normally require NDAs with established businesses for, and won't offer random people.

If they require an NDA, they'll probably refuse to provide it for the purpose of Linux drivers?

Unless it's just some dumb formality. I can try Linux Foundation.

Yeah it depends on their stance, some vendors just want an entity that can be bound by contract and they could theoretically sue if you leak their docs, and the Linux Foundation can serve that role.

More info here: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/nda

Thanks for the pointer!

This is definitely not true. It’s even sometimes possible to negotiate contract and NDA terms with Large Corporations for the specific purpose of producing open source code based on NDA specs.

Source: been there, done that.

Why would they need an NDA then if they would be OK with open source implementation? It's good if that's possible, it just doesn't make sense.

There are all kinds of reasons. One basic example would be if the vendor has a data sheet but does not have the right to grant anyone redistribution rights to the datasheet or may even be restricted from allowing anyone to read it without an NDA. Another might be that the vendor has a general rule that their engineers don’t talk to outside people without an NDA but has decided, as a business matter, to allow the engineers to talk to a specific developer and that they want an open source driver developed. A third might be that the vendor wants to be able to have detailed conversations about proprietary implementation details of their hardware and decide later which details are going to become public.

That's what Marcus said himself, too

"<mglock> DisplayLink TM seems to be very communactive. <mglock> asked the for specs for their DL-120/DL-160 chips, and got a detailed answer withing 4 hours."

Yes, looks to me that the author was being sarcastic with "unhelpful".

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