Adaptec AAC raid support

[Charles Swiger]

On Mar 19, 2005, at 3:50 PM, Theo de Raadt wrote:
>> Sigh.  Theo, there are lots of ways of interacting with other people:
>> if you go out of your way to antagonize somebody, the result is
>> generally not going to be positive.  I think Scott is mature enough to
>> continue to help other BSD projects-- including OpenBSD-- regardless,
>> but this sort of thing:
>
> No, Scott is the person standing in the way of us and the RAID
> vendors by --
>
>     1) insulting our (often very successful efforts) to free things --
>        in public forums
>
>     2) by signing NDA's with vendors so that those vendors who then
>        come to believe that we should be signing NDA's too.

Scott is or was under NDA with Adaptec.  Scott certainly is not in a 
position to give away all of Adaptec's internal documentation.  
Frankly, I doubt even the CEO of Adaptec would be free to simply give 
away all of their internal docs-- Adaptec undoubtedly has NDA 
obligations with their partners, chip suppliers, and so forth, which 
constrains what they can make public.

None of this should be surprising.
None of this means that Scott wants you to sign NDAs.

It may be the case that _Adaptec_ wants an NDA before releasing the 
information you've asked for, in which case you can accept or refuse to 
do so as you please.  Scott != Adaptec.

>     3) by not insisting at all that vendors open things at least a
>        bit, Scott is not like Bill Paul or others who have opened
>        up a lot of hardware, but is a lot more like Sam Leffler who
>        has perpetuated this (and today, FreeBSD has one 802.11g/a
>        driver -- and it uses binary bits).

Yes, well, I prefer the former approach myself, but I am not going to 
complain that Sam has written a wireless driver using binary firmware 
rather than one that is completely open.  I appreciate the work he's 
done, even if I would like to see a completely open series of wireless 
drivers.

>> ...deliberately breaking OpenBSD's support for Adaptec hardware as 
>> some
>> sort of ultimatum is a childish and self-destructive action.  I hope
>> the other OpenBSD committers veto any such action as being
>> counterproductive and harmful to your users.
>
> Counter productive?  About 6 years ago we did this with Qlogic because
> their firmware images were not free enough to ship in our releases,
> and after 6 months of wasting our time and being stalemated, we
> informed Qlogic and our user community (as well as YOUR user
> community) that we were removing the support for their controllers.  A
> few days later the firmware was free.

Getting into a fight and winning is better than getting into a fight 
and losing.

However, perhaps you might consider that if you can obtain what you 
want without getting into needless conflicts, we'd all spend our time 
doing more productive things than squabbling.

> But now Scott --- one of your leading developers, and a previous 
> Adaptec
> employee --- goes public and says that our efforts should not be 
> assisted.
>
> What's in it for him?

It must be a conspiracy, huh?  A paranoic could come up with all sorts 
of nefarious reasons, but the truth is probably much more prosaic.

>> Otherwise, you're likely to discover that most people choose to run an
>> OS which works with the hardware they have, rather than sticking with
>> OpenBSD.
>
> We have no problem.  People run non-free software all the time, such
> as Windows or the FreeBSD binary-only aaccli.
>
> It does not fit our principles though.  But Scott feels that is reason
> to slag us.

I very much doubt that Scott was "slagging you" in reaction to 
OpenBSD's desire to remain completely pure open source.

I hope you and the OpenBSD developers can get the information you need 
to work with all of the hardware that your project wants to support.  
But the hardware vendors aren't obligated to meet your demands, any 
more than you are obligated to sign an NDA that you don't want to sign.

-- 
-Chuck