Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers
David Revoy chronicles his frustrating endeavor to get major drawing tablet brands like Gaomon and Huion to officially support Linux FLOSS drivers. His attempts hit a wall when brands balked at contributing to an open-source infrastructure heavily branded with their competitor, Wacom. This story illuminates how historical naming conventions in open source can inadvertently create competitive barriers, hindering broader adoption and collaboration for the Linux community.
The Lowdown
David Revoy, known for his hardware reviews, details his persistent efforts to facilitate the creation of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) drivers for drawing tablets on GNU/Linux. His standard practice involves testing new tablets with FLOSS and providing detailed specifications to Red Hat developers Peter Hutterer and Benjamin Tissoire for their udev-hid-bpf project, enabling them to create open drivers.
- Revoy attempted a new strategy: directly engaging drawing tablet brands to collaborate and share specifications with the Linux hid/input teams, hoping to streamline driver development.
- He made promising contact with a technical manager representing multiple brands (Gaomon, XpPen, Huion, Ugee) and sent them all relevant project details.
- Despite initial enthusiasm, the brands ultimately rejected collaboration, explicitly citing concerns that the open-source driver infrastructure (e.g.,
libwacom,wacom-hid-descriptors) is heavily Wacom-branded. - They expressed unwillingness to share device specifications with what appeared to be a Wacom-led project, fearing their products would be associated with a competitor and thus limiting the perceived impact for their own brand.
- Revoy attributes this failure to a "bad design decision" of Wacom-centric branding within the core open-source driver repositories, which creates a competitive disincentive for other manufacturers.
- He plans to revert to his prior, more arduous method of reviewing and documenting tablet specifications one by one, acknowledging its limitations and eventual unsustainability without direct brand collaboration.
Revoy concludes that the pervasive Wacom branding within the foundational Linux drawing tablet driver projects acts as a significant deterrent, preventing rival brands from openly contributing to and benefiting from a collaborative open-source environment. This structural issue forces individual efforts to piece together Linux support for new hardware, tablet by tablet.