> you guys want to produce fully open and unencumbered stuff. That's
> wonderful. But why is it so important to go around screaming and
> yelling about it and alientating those who do try to help? Let me
> tell you, Doug is about the most positive and supportive guy you'll
> ever have at Adaptec, pissing him off really won't produce results.
> Why is it so important to drag your users into your political fights
> by depriving them of stuff that works now but isn't exactly everything
> that you want? I'd love to have fully open stuff from all the RAID
> companies too, but I also want the users of FreeBSD to be able to use
> the resources that are out there to their full advantage and not be
> pinned down by my political beliefs on the subject.
Actually Scott it's rather simple,
As long as projects are willing to have someone sign an NDA
and be a shill for the vendors, you end up with vendors who wish to hide
everything behind an NDA and produce binary only stuff. I as a user
don't want that, and plain and simple, I just bought 27 LSI cards for
that reason - I don't want to wait for non-free support to show up, and
I don't want to have to wedge in some binary only thing after the fact.
I want it to work with the OS, and be installed with it.
When vendors have the option to close their product and have
some few designated souls who will act as their shills and put in a
non-free layer for a free os, then they don't release docs, and everyone
suffers with poor support - with a driver that doesn't work by default
in the OS, because it can't be included. With a driver that isn't
redistributable in commercial spinoffs, because it can't be included.
With a driver that I can't install onto, because it can't be included
on the install sets. Basically, the binary only closed source nda stuff
sucks, just like the altheros driver.
I don't see supporting a verdor making a decision to NDA their
product by finding ways to sneak non-free support in as productive,
Actually, I see that this harms the free community, and harms it an
awful lot. because now this vendor instead of providing documentation
so the free community can truly have community support for this product,
gets to pay lip service to the free os world and say "sure we are
supported by free operating systems" when really they aren't.
Involving the user community makes sure the user community
knows what the score is, and knows what products to buy (case in point,
my recent purchase of 27 LSI adapters, rather than Adaptec). I think
letting the user community believe that a company is fully supportive
of free operating systems when they really are not is dishonest to the
user community, and screws them in the end when they make bad purchasing
decisions.
I think a company has every right to have a closed source,
binary only driver. I think the user community has the right to know
about that, ask for better, and if they don't like it, know to vote
with their feet. I for one don't want to see a situation where I can't
install an OS on a scsi controller without resorting to 3rd party
special license packages, or at least, not on a controller I've paid
good money for.
-Bob
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