Tablet Makers Won't Help Linux Drivers Because the Repo Is Named After Wacom
David Revoy tried to broker a deal between Gaomon's engineers and Red Hat's driver team. Gaomon declined, balking that the open-source infrastructure carries the name of their biggest competitor.
udev-hid-bpf already lets the community write drivers, and device descriptors fall out of hid-recorder in minutes. The flip: the blocker isn't engineering at all but the libwacom branding, which means a fork-and-rename could dissolve a decade-old standoff.
David Revoy, a digital artist and Krita contributor, recounts trying to connect non-Wacom tablet brands directly with Red Hat's driver developers. Gaomon's technical team declined, and their reason was branding, not capability: the open-source driver infrastructure, repos like libwacom and wacom-hid-descriptors, is named after Wacom, their biggest competitor. They feared contributing specs would help Wacom and that the ecosystem would keep carrying Wacom's name regardless.
Why the technical bar here is almost nonexistent
The engineering is, by Revoy's account, trivial. udev-hid-bpf enables community-written drivers, Red Hat's Peter Hutterer and Benjamin Tissoire have already built drivers for many Huion, XP-Pen and Ugee models, and device descriptors extract in minutes with hid-recorder. The thread largely agreed the obstacle is optics, and proposed the obvious fix.
"fork and rename the … wacom-hid-descriptors project, strip all wacom references. then share w/ the other tablet brands. problem solved." — a commenter naming the exact repo
Others framed the inertia itself as the real story.
"If the project being named after Wacom is actively causing other companies to not contribute… I don't understand why this is even a debate vs. just changing the name to something vendor neutral." — a commenter reframing the debate
One reader reached for precedent the ecosystem already lived through.
"we've went through the whole pointless master -> main branch rename in so many projects which was much more disruptive — at least this one could serve a purpose?" — a commenter drawing the analogy
But a practicing artist widened the lens past Linux entirely.
"It's not like they collaborate on closed-source drivers either. If you have two different brands of tablets in your life then you get to deal with weird bugs from their drivers fighting." — an artist running multiple tablet brands
That last point reframes the whole affair: the rename might unblock FLOSS contributions, yet the deeper non-cooperation between rivals would persist on every platform — branding is the surmountable half of the problem.
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