Yes, it's a pretty sad state of affairs. What annoys me the most is
that companies actually believe they are protecting something when
they don't make their device driver source or hardware documentation
available. It has been well proven for years that the most withholding
accomplishes for the vast majority of these device drivers is a slight
delay--- perhaps a week or two, before competitors figure out what
they've done. Pirates don't care... they want the binaries anyway,
they aren't programmers. And the open-source community has always
strictly adhered to copyright and license restrictions. So all these
companies are doing is making life harder for themselves and for
their products. Unnecessarily. The XFree folks have some godaweful
stories about the crap they've had to wade through to get video
manufacturers on-board. Some video manufacturers have figured it out,
a lot haven't.
It also annoys me that certain people who should know better still seem
to believe that open-source programmers are somehow substandard verses
their commercial counterparts.
I have one thing to say to that: Most open source programmers *ARE*
professional programmers in their day jobs. We aren't talking about
14 year old wannabees here. Sure, there are lots of kids playing around
with open-source systems, but don't make the mistake of assuming that
these are the ones doing most of the serious kernel work. Most of the
important work gets done by serious people.
The quality of the open-source work tends to be much, much, MUCH higher
then the quality of the programming produced by commercial companies,
mainly because open-source work is opened up to peer review and
programmers are doing it for fun, without the pressures of due dates
or idiot managers. Every piece of proprietary commercial code I've
ever seen has mostly been crap, and I don't expect that to change anytime
soon.
The paranoia of many commercial companies is misplaced. There are many
classes of systems that obviously shouldn't be open-sourced, such as
commercial hosted systems (e.g. most website backends), and many major
programs are chock full of third-party-licensed technology that can't
be redistributed (e.g. Netscape 4.x and earlier). But there are just
as many that obviously should and device drivers belong for the
most part in the latter category. I am not aiming this specifically
at Dennis... each company needs to make its own decision. But I will
say that the reasons Dennis states for the decision are mostly due to
incorrect assumptions and paranoia and have nothing to do with reality.
It's unfortunate, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. High
technology requires young minds and old managers are having a harder
and harder time dictating old paranoia to those people. If companies
want quality programmers they are having to become more flexible
and less paranoid. It is a slow process, but it is obviously working.
-Matt
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