Dear Mr. Awad. It has come to my attention, yet again, that intel, despite its claims of being Open Source friendly, is again failing to produce pertient API information for its products and restrictive licencing, terms and conditions. This goes against the whole priciple of open source in all its forms and unfortunately, I no longer purchase your products or recommend them to anyone else and will continue to use other suppliers until you change this policy.
As you are probably aware, there are several open source products e.g. Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and others. Further, there are different licenses ie. BSD, Apache, GPL etc. Despite the different licencing policies, all the open source projects need the same thing. The key component is that source should be open. If you can't provide source then API's have to be open (no licencing, agreements, restrictions etc.) so they can write efficient and reliable drivers for your products, which I should note, is a free service to your company. In the case of OpenBSD, one of the most efficient and secure OS's, below is an outake from their policy page, which you should take the time to read in full. http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html "Because the OpenBSD copyright imposes no conditions beyond those imposed by the Berkeley copyright, OpenBSD can hope to share the same wide distribution and applicability as the Berkeley distributions. It follows however, that OpenBSD cannot include material which includes copyrights which are more restrictive than the Berkeley copyright, or must relegate this material to a secondary status, i.e. OpenBSD as a whole is freely redistributable, but some optional components may not be." A number of applications have been culled from OpenBSD because of licensing issues. A lot of people on different projects do a lot of work getting intel products to work, for very little thanks and usually no money. Do NOT make it harder for them than it already is and do NOT squander the good will of the open source community as they are IT professionals with a large networking base and you will rapidly find your products being rejected at companies and data centers, which is something neither you, your management or your shareholders will appreciate in the long run. I hope you, as a company, will take the time to learn what the open source community needs and expects, and will create a consistent and open framework that meets ALL their needs. When this happens, I will gladly reconsider the purchase and recommendation of intel products. -- Regards...Martin
