Some recent discussion in a community forum has brought the following files to my attention:

drivers/net/appletalk/cops_ltdrv.h
drivers/net/appletalk/cops_ffdrv.h

These files belong to the linux/drivers/net/appletalk/cops.c driver, which is apparently used for some ISA AppleTalk networking cards from the 80s/90s.  The first thing of note is that these "header files" are actually firmware blobs, not code/headers.  Secondly, the license is not GPLv2 and appears to potentially be non-Free in general:

/*
 *	The firmware this driver downloads into the Localtalk card is a
 *	separate program and is not GPL'd source code, even though the Linux
 *	side driver and the routine that loads this data into the card are.
 *	
 *	It is taken from the COPS SDK and is under the following license
 *
 *	This material is licensed to you strictly for use in conjunction with
 *	the use of COPS LocalTalk adapters.
 *	There is no charge for this SDK. And no waranty express or implied
 *	about its fitness for any purpose. However, we will cheerefully
 *	refund every penny you paid for this SDK...
 *	Regards,
 *
 *	Thomas F. Divine
 *	Chief Scientist
 */

If this driver is desired to be kept, these blobs should be moved to the linux-firmware repository.  However, this is a driver for 80s/90s networking cards for a long-defunct protocol, and looking at the git blame [1] indicates the only attention it has gotten in the past ~15 years has been extremely small changes cause by re-factoring elsewhere in the tree.  It looks as though there is a complete lack of interest in/use of this driver for quite some time.

Moreover, an RFC about removing the cops driver was posted in March of 2021 about removing the driver, and got no responses, further indicating lack of interest in the driver. [2]  I also searched this Bugzilla, and no reports regarding this driver exist. [3]

All indications show this driver is unused, unmaintained, untested, and likely broken due to the lack of use/testing.  Additionally, Debian has already been removing this driver from their builds for 15+ years [4] with seemingly 0 issue.


Given that there appear to have been 0 users for quite some time, and the potential license concerns, is it time to finally remove this driver?


[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blame/master/drivers/net/appletalk/cops.c
[2] https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg731731.html
[3] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=cops.c&list_id=1122488
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/commits/master/debian/patches/debian/dfsg/drivers-net-appletalk-cops.patch