Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors

[Da Rock]

On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 13:43 -0700, Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 02:16:34AM -0800, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> > > > Unfortunately, anything covered by a patent, as I hinted
> > > > above, is verboten.
> > 
> > Er, doesn't it depend on what is patented?  If the h/w itself is
> > patented, but its software-visible interface is not, there should be
> > no problem writing a driver for that h/w.  OTOH if the algorithms
> > used in the driver are patented it would be an infringement to
> > reproduce them.
> 
> I said anything covered by patent.  If the software is not covered by
> patent, you're fine to write software.  Be aware, though, that a lot of
> patents are intentionally written in a somewhat vague way so they can be
> extended via case law at a later date.
> 
> Nothing is "legal" under the current US system unless you can defend it
> in civil court.  That's my general rule of thumb.
> 

That doesn't sound like a good system (US not yours) - how on earth did
it get so screwed up? (Thats rhetorical btw, I don't mean to start a
whole discussion on that topic on this list.)