Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors

[Jerry]

On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:35:46 -0500
Michael Powell <nightrecon at verizon.net> wrote:

>My reservation to the 3D driver thing is it is setting a very dangerous
>precedent if the solution involves allowing a third party commercial
>enterprise to dictate features FreeBSD "must include" before they will
>support it.
>
>In this case with NVidia and the amd64 3D driver let's say for sake of
>argument the developers decide "we want the amd64 3D driver so let's
>go ahead and add in abc_function() and xyz_function(). Later the
>situation is repeated with ATI mandating that abc_function() or
>xyz_function() must be altered to ATI's specs to get ATI 3D
>acceleration. Now you have two commercial companies using FreeBSD as
>the mud puddle in a tug of war game.
>
>Do we really want third parties to have the ability to dictate to the
>devs what code goes into FreeBSD? I have doubts that this is a good
>path.

From my understanding of the requests by NVidia; the changes they asked
for were required to make a fully functional driver. They also stated
that other manufacturers would need/require such code changes also. In
any case, I fail to see what the problem is. Microsoft has make
numerous modifications to its code to enable third party products to
work correctly. With the advent of 'touch screens' now becoming a
reality, along with voice recognition, etc., it seems that FreeBSD
would want to stay ahead of the curve rather than playing catchup.
Heck, unless I am mistaken, the ability to 'hot plug' a USB device does
not even exist in FBSD, although I have heard that work is being done
on it. Unfortunately, the technology has existed for over ten years.

Trying to get hardware vendors interested in your product while
simultaneously telling them to go screw themselves because you have no
intention of working with them does not seem like a workable business
model to me.

-- 
Jerry
gesbbb at yahoo.com

Therefore it is necessary to learn how not to be good, and to use
this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the cause.

	Machiavelli
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