"Microsoft's developers were missing in action after the company donated GPL-licensed drivers to the Linux kernel community in July, leaving significant work to the Linux community, according to Linux driver project lead and Novell fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman.

The drivers required a "massive cleanup effort," consisting of more than 200 patches to bring the code into a "semi-sane kernel coding style," Kroah-Hartman wrote in the status report.

"Their code needed lots of work to get to normal Linux coding style acceptance, that's nothing new. It did take over 200 patches to get their code into reasonable shape, which is a bit excessive," he said.

Microsoft did not contribute to the patching effort.

"Microsoft developers seem to have disappeared, and no one is answering my e-mails. If they do not show back up to claim this driver soon, it will be removed in the 2.6.33 release. So sad..." Kroah-Hartman wrote in the status report."... SDTimes