Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors

[Chad Perrin]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 09:35:59PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> >>NVidia MUST INCLUDE full documentation of their hardware.
> >>this is normal - hardware manufacturer produces hardware, programmers
> >>do make support for it.
> >>
> >>what is common today isn't normal.
> >
> >I honestly have no idea what you are trying to communicate here.
> 
> exactly what i wrote. the problem is that people like You (and millions
> others) are willing to buy product without any documentation.

You may find this surprising, but sometimes circumstances lead people to
make purchases of "total package" products rather than building something
piecemeal or being able to specify what goes into a purchase at a very
fine-grained level.  Laptop purchases in particular suffer the problem of
tending to be preconfigured package deals -- and sometimes you have to
compromise on getting fully documented hardware with open specs in order
to meet other requirements that are more critical to your immediate
needs.

This may especially be a problem for people who need a known-good
physical interface to stave off repetitive stress injury (for example).

Then again, judging by some of your statements, you probably feel that
laptops should never be used with FreeBSD unless they've been repurposed
as file servers.


> 
> if you think they do this to hide their hardware secrets you are wrong.
> See x86 instruction set - does it reveal how Intel or Amd made their 
> processor so fast? no!
> 
> They do this to hide their hardware faults that way - that's the true 
> reason they do this.
> 
> With new hardware produced every year it MUST be buggy and certainly there 
> are thousands of hardware bugs.
> 
> with "secret" drivers - they can easily hide them. AFAIK at least half of 
> their driver code are to do workaround of their hardware bugs.

I rather suspect that a much stronger, and more common, reason for
obstinate refusal to open specs is the short-sightedness and general
ignorance of daycoders and pointy-haired bosses -- all of whom think Java
is the best programming language around because that's what "most"
programmers use and have some vague, unsupported (but stubborn) notion
that secrets are good for business.  At least it *seems* they all think
so.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
A: It reverses the normal flow of conversation.
Q: What's wrong with top-posting?
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