Re: Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, Darrin Chandler wrote:

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 03:36:51PM -0300, User Freebsd wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, Nikolas Britton wrote:

* No binary blob drivers.

This is one that I don't necessarily agree with ... if Adaptec came out
with a *supported* iir driver, but it was binary only, I'd be happy with
that ... I just want to know that if I *have* a problem with a piece of
hardware, that I can get support for it ...

A lot of people agree with you, but I'm not one of them. It's not about
you being inconvenienced in this particular case. It's about choice, and
vendors supporting the customers by providing *specs*.

What if they provide a blob for FreeBSD but you decide you want to run
NetBSD on a particular machine and there's no blob? Or much more likely:
what if they provide a blob for Linux, but not for FreeBSD? Should they
also provide a blob for Plan 9?

If the specs are not open, then your choices are limited to what the
vendor wants to develop and support. And that's likely to be Windows,
and maybe Linux, and maybe maybe FreeBSD.

OTOH, if the vendor opens the specs then good, solid drivers can be
written for whatever platform. And ported. And if there's a problem it
can be fixed. This even turns out to benefit people who don't give a
hoot about whether something is "free" or "open" or not.

My point isn't that I *liked* binary-only drivers ... my point is that I'd rather a company like Adaptec to *at least* supply a binary driver if they require their specs to be closed, then provide *no means* for me to use Adaptec products ...

Right now, I personally am being hurt more by having *nothing* from Adaptec, binary or open, then I would be if they'd provide something binary, since under 4.x, the Adaptec driver *was* rock solid, so I felt pretty safe upgrading to 6.x, which turns out was not so smart a move ...

How many out there are *still* running 4.x on their servers and desktops, for similar fears?

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy@xxxxxxx MSN . scrappy@xxxxxxx
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