--As of March 17, 2011 7:48:58 PM -0400, Jerry is alleged to have said:
>
> I have two Linksys Wireless-N PCI cards in front of me that work
> fine on a Windows platform. FreeBSD doesn't even have a driver for
> them, thereby rendering them useless. I suppose that is Microsoft's
> fault too.
No, not really. It's more the fault of the hardware manufacturer.
Chad, up until this point I had taken your response seriously. In fact,
I thought it was well presented. Then, you went and blew it. You fell
into that trap that is all to prevalent in the open-source community,
and especially odious with the *BSDs. That being the "blame the
manufacturer" banner. If at first it doesn't work, blame the
manufacturer. Strangely enough, those two Wireless-N cards work in
Windows from at least XP forward (no surprise there), but they also
work with Ubuntu from what I have read on their forums. I also believe
that Linux supports the chip, although I don't have the time or
ambition to check it out right now. I do remember checking over a year
ago, and a driver was suppose to be available. BSD is notorious for
bringing up the rear with its offerings of drivers. It is just easier
to blame someone else I suppose. I know you are now going say that the
hardware manufacturer should be responsible for the driver. I totally
disagree. There is no way that a manufacturer can reasonably be expected
to product a driver for the extremely fragmented open-source
community. Look how much trouble nVidia had getting 64 bit drivers
into FreeBSD. You cannot even get the community to agree on a
replacement for HAL. They aim for the biggest target, linux and
basically leave the rest to their own devices. You can blame the
open-source community in general and *BSD in particular for that
problem. Even if they did come to some consensus, they would end up in a
pissing contest over the license.
--As for the rest, it is mine.
Given that he's answering off the cuff as it were, and knows absolutely
nothing about the cards... The manufacturer is a decent random guess as to
who's fault it is. It's not Microsoft's, it might be the hardware
manufacturer's, or it might be the FreeBSD team's. The FreeBSD team
generally does a good job at trying to get drivers for everything it can,
so there is slightly more chance that a random card doesn't work because of
the manufacturer than because of the FreeBSD team.
The additional knowledge that Linux supports them means the manufacturer
isn't totally closed to supporting Open-source software, but tells us
nothing beyond that. Linux's support may be by way of a binary blob from
Linksys, which doesn't help FreeBSD at all. The cards would still need to
be reverse-engineered from scratch.
If the manufacturer releases some technical documents on how to talk to the
cards, that's a start at helping people write drivers. Even if they do
nothing else.
But chewing out Chad because he makes the guess that two cards he knows
nothing about are not supported because the manufacturer hasn't supplied
the support to make them supported (which they probably have on at least
Windows, if not Linux as well) is just blaming him for not being able to
read your mind about hardware you have in hand.
Daniel T. Staal
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