> On 10/5/06, Theo de Raadt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I have decided to make public this letter which I sent to the OLPC
> > ("One Laptop Per Child" group, which is strongly associated with Red
> > Hat.
> [snip]
>
> See Jim Gettys defense at http://www.gettysfamily.org/wordpress/?p=27
He cleverly avoids the entire issue I brought up --
Non-disclosure agreements with chip vendors result
in source code drivers which cannot be maintained
later because the documentation is not available
to those who would wish to maintain the driver.
Jim is obviously very clever at convincing people that children need
proprietary laptops (OLPC has a greater percentage of undocumented
hardware than a Thinkpad from 3 years ago). It is easy for Jim to
convince people these things because he doesn't care at all about the
future maintainance of drivers. I do. And I think most of you also
do.
(Somewhere else Jim basically said in about 2 years they are likely to
choose another chip, and then all their developers with documentation
under NDA will ... I guess stop maintaining the Linux Marvell driver)
Every posting from him mentions the children, as a way to encourage
people to believe him. You can't say anything bad about the children,
can you? But behind that mention of the children, look -- here is a
Red Hat employeee spouting the same proprietary balony we hear all the
time from vendors like Intel and Broadcom.
