Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors

[Da Rock]

On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 16:23 -0700, Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 07:07:36AM +1000, Da Rock wrote:
> > 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.)
> 
> It's much the same everywhere, from what I've seen.  The problems just
> arise in different guises.  Usually, judging by my observations, they
> arise in large part because of the common notion that a problem can be
> fixed with more of the behavior that created the problem in the first
> place.
> 
> . . . but beyond that, I'd probably start a flame war, so I don't think I
> want to get more specific on the list.
> 

Probably not- the flames would probably be directed at a common enemy rather than amongst ourselves here.