Don't tell Greg Kroah-Hartman that Linux hurts for device drivers. He's heard too much of that rap, and he's already done plenty to stop it. We should thank him and help pick up the ball. I'm doing both here.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel maintainer, and head of the Linux Drivers Project. He is a Novell Fellow, and works on the SUSE distribution for that company. At the Linux Foundation, Kroah-Hartman has helped to compile the “Who Writes Linux?” survey for the past few years.

Here's one from the file of random stuff you see when you put a new machine on the upstream kernel instead of the distro kernel. USB drivers for Linux will be GPL-only with the release of the upcoming kernel 2.6.25.. USB maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman writes: "Over two years ago, the Linux USB developers stated that they believed there was no way to create a USB kernel driver that was not under the GPL. This patch moves the USB apis to enforce that decision."

Microsoft has denied that it has stopped work on the Hyper-V drivers for Linux that it released in July. Greg Kroah-Hartman had noted in a recent status report on the state of Linux drivers that Microsoft had not responded to the over 200 patches that had been created to clean up Microsoft's code.

With the Linux 2.6.32 kernel merge window opening up this month, open-source developers around the world have been busy working on their code that they wish to push into this next major kernel update.

Remember the offer Greg Kroah-Hartman made earlier this year, to get Linux drivers written for free for any company that wanted them?

I wasn't at the Linux Plumber Conference in Portland, OR, but everyone who pays close attention to Linux knows that Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer and Novell engineer, blasted Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, for contributing "In the past 3 years, from the 2.6.15 kernel to 2.6.27-rc6, Canonical has had 100 patches in the Linux kernel."

In time for the X.Org 7.5 release (whenever that may come), David Airlie has put out new driver releases for nineteen of the X.Org video drivers. These aren't updates to the mainline ATI/AMD, Intel, or even NVIDIA drivers, but some of the drivers for less common graphics hardware.

The kernel developers have added new features to thousands of the Linux kernel's existing drivers and integrated numerous additional drivers. This further increases the variety of hardware supported by Linux.