The future of NetBSD

[Andreas Klemm]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 08:14:31PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Miod Vallat wrote:
> 
> >>If the vendor is supporting the driver, and working with the community,
> >>then one would hope that they would also fix the driver as bug reports
> >>come in about it ...
> >
> >That's too many ifs to be realworld-compatible.
> >
> >And actually the only vendors I can think of which are working with the
> >community actually provide documentation, if only because it is simpler
> >for them to spend time on documentation than on code for N different
> >systems.
> 
> ICP Vortex (aka Adaptec) were providing drivers on their web site for 
> FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x that are included in both source trees ... it was a 
> binary driver, as far as I'm aware, but source code ... and Adaptec 
> doesn't provide documentation ...

I don't think that binary only drivers are well enough.
Surely better than nothing but ...

Don't forget that an open source team sometimes makes api changes
that might break a "binary only" driver. And companies sometimes
are slow in fixing.

Or the vendor did some mistakes in his own driver.
First the paying customers are served. All the other folks
(open source ..) surely will come last.

For some smaller corps supporting open source developers is
simply a burden that costs time and so money.

I know this from a medium sized german company producing nice
audio recording cards.

It was impossible to get a card and documentation from them for
a FreeBSD developers. And after weeks and months of asking via
e-mail they decided finally to tell the truth that they don't
want to support open source developers anymore, it makes too much
work. They are unable to spend so much time answering open source
developers questions although they got documentation. This experience
they made with Linux developers.

	Andreas ///

-- 
Andreas Klemm - Powered by FreeBSD 6
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