On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Matt Dillon wrote:
> 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.
Indeed. If anything, releasing specs and reference driver code
should serve to increase the market for a given piece of hardware.
The free OS market is into double digits now as a percentage of the
total market. That's certainly not dominant, but it *is* significant.
Personally, I will not buy any hardware that doesn't work on
FreeBSD, period. That said, I find binary drivers acceptable, but I
prefer open source drivers.
I have some legacy hardware that isn't yet supported, that's
waiting for a Round Tuit for me to write the needed code. When I've
done that, I'm going to contribute it as my way of giving something
back--a commercial OS as good as FreeBSD would be very, very costly,
after all, and no one has charged me anything for it.
> [...open source code is usually much better than closed commercial
> code...]
>
> 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.
The yound minds of today are the old minds of tomorrow. :-/
--
Chris BeHanna
Software Engineer
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