Webcams, eye-candy and Phonon

[Arc Riley]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 05:28:24PM +0200, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> 
> While the hardware interface is open and documented, they want to keep the 
> additional software closed (IP protection, third-party NDAs and so on). We 
> have agreed that providing the customer with open-source free software 
> drivers to access the webcams and optional binary modules for eye-candy would 
> be the best trade-off.

This is not the view of many free software advocates and this 
proprietary code should not find it's way into KDE4.

What I would suggest is seeing what these effects are and implementing 
them from scratch.  Otherwise, prehaps a "video processing" API is 
needed which allows both free and proprietary effects to be achived 
through a standalone executable communicating through a unix pipe/etc.

It really sounds to me that linksys is just trying to make sure this 
proprietary effects software will only work with their hardware, as they 
do on Windows as a marketing gimmik to sell their cameras.  This sort of 
behavior is not acceptable to the free software community.