Re: Adaptec AAC raid support

From: Theo de Raadt (deraadt_at_cvs.openbsd.org)
Date: 03/19/05

  • Next message: Charles Swiger: "Re: Adaptec AAC raid support" 
    To: Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 13:50:40 -0700

    > Sigh. Theo, there are lots of ways of interacting with other people:
    > if you go out of your way to antagonize somebody, the result is
    > generally not going to be positive. I think Scott is mature enough to
    > continue to help other BSD projects-- including OpenBSD-- regardless,
    > but this sort of thing:

    No, Scott is the person standing in the way of us and the RAID
    vendors by --

        1) insulting our (often very successful efforts) to free things --
           in public forums

        2) by signing NDA's with vendors so that those vendors who then
           come to believe that we should be signing NDA's too.

        3) by not insisting at all that vendors open things at least a
           bit, Scott is not like Bill Paul or others who have opened
           up a lot of hardware, but is a lot more like Sam Leffler who
           has perpetuated this (and today, FreeBSD has one 802.11g/a
           driver -- and it uses binary bits).

    > > Those controllers will not be supported in OpenBSD 3.7 in May. If
    > > Adaptec wishes them to be supported in a future release, they had
    > > better come and make amends. We are sick of supporting the hardware
    > > of vendors who *** on their customers via us. Maybe they can repair
    > > this horrid situation enough that we will once again support their
    > > controllers by the time OpenBSD 3.8 ships in November.
    >
    > ...deliberately breaking OpenBSD's support for Adaptec hardware as some
    > sort of ultimatum is a childish and self-destructive action. I hope
    > the other OpenBSD committers veto any such action as being
    > counterproductive and harmful to your users.

    Counter productive? About 6 years ago we did this with Qlogic because
    their firmware images were not free enough to ship in our releases,
    and after 6 months of wasting our time and being stalemated, we
    informed Qlogic and our user community (as well as YOUR user
    community) that we were removing the support for their controllers. A
    few days later the firmware was free.

    But now Scott --- one of your leading developers, and a previous Adaptec
    employee --- goes public and says that our efforts should not be assisted.

    What's in it for him?

    > Otherwise, you're likely to discover that most people choose to run an
    > OS which works with the hardware they have, rather than sticking with
    > OpenBSD.

    We have no problem. People run non-free software all the time, such
    as Windows or the FreeBSD binary-only aaccli.

    It does not fit our principles though. But Scott feels that is reason
    to slag us.
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