Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?

[Darrin Chandler]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 04:16:55PM -0300, User Freebsd wrote:
> 
> And my point is that those not supporting FreeBSD already don't care, 
> since as far as they are concerned, their is no market for them to be 
> losing .... not buying their products isn't telling them anything they 
> didn't already believe ...

Actually, this is a very valid point. A good approach would be to write
to the vendor and tell them than you had considered their product and it
looks good based on purely technical mertis, but you had to go with a
competitors products due to availability of technical documentation.

Frankly, the lost sales from FreeBSD will get lost in the noise for a
company like Adaptec. However, a few dozen or a few hundred letters like
above would carry a fair amount of weight. Leave out any attitude or
flames. Just tell them their competitor made money instead of them.

AMD has played pretty nice with specs, along with price and other things
to be comptetitive. It's worked well for them. Has Intel changed because
of this? You bet. In addition to lowering prices, they've begun to open
specs. Yes! That's a win for everyone, even Intel, and Intel is
beginning to suspect...

Now, can we get Adaptec or Broadcom to follow suite? Maybe. Some
companies are slow learners. Counting FreeBSD installs and telling them
how many there are won't do nearly as much as 1 out of 1000 FreeBSD
users writing them a letter telling them you bought from their
competitors because of their policies. Bonus points if the competitor
has been nipping at their heels lately. ;)

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |