linux friendly camera manufacturers?

http://lwn.net/Articles/227852/

It's a sad, sad world we live in where *reading an image file* could be described as `breaking in' to anything :(

Especially considering that the image file is NOT owned by the company that sold the camera, but by the person taking the picture, so why do they think they have a right to deny the photographer access to the data?

It seems to me that the lack of interest that the general public has shown about the increasing problems around intellectual property has emboldened corporations to push even further into claiming ownership of things that people have usually taken for granted. Sooner or later people will wake up to this, and there will be reckoning.

From what I understand in the Nikon situation they are contemplating (or trying) to deny the user access to the white balance data, not the actual sensor data. I guess Nikon could try to argue that those correction curves are their proprietary property.

To quote Dave Coffin (of dcraw fame)"

A firestorm of controversy recently erupted when Thomas Knoll of Adobe accused Nikon of encrypting the white balance data in the D2X and D2Hs cameras, thus preventing Adobe from fully supporting these cameras.
I cracked this encryption on April 15, and updated dcraw.c and parse.c on April 17. So "dcraw -w" now works correctly with all Nikon cameras.
This is not a new problem. Phase One, Sony, Foveon, and Canon all apply some form of encryption to their RAW files. Dcraw decodes them all -- you can easily find decryption code by searching for the ^ operator.
Compression is not encryption. Phase One and Sony do encryption only. Kodak does compression only. Canon, Nikon, and Foveon compress the image data and encrypt some of the metadata.