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SubjectRE: Binary drivers
Date
> > 1. From the corporate management point of view, driver source makes it
> > easier for a competitor to reverse engineer a product or create
> one with a
> > hardware-compatible interface. This allows the competitor to
> come in with a
> > cheaper product because they didn't have to do any of the
> original R&D to
> > define the interface nor develope the software to drive it.
> This will delay
> > or prevent some companies from supporting Linux.
>
> It's a free market. They don't have to support Linux, they dont have to
> provide source. The customer is always right. Its also fairly
> naive to think
> that it won't get reverse engineered if its annoying enough.

Exactly .. and on the topic of the hardware being reverse engineered ..
there's at least one software product I know of, (commercially) available
which makes the reverse engineering processes much easier, and even goes as
far as creating driver skeletons for the hardware you want to create a
driver for (for windows and linux.. and all you need to know is which device
in your system you want to work with)

> 'early adopters' of your toy. The fact that putting the pdf of
> the chip docs
> on the web page gets them to write drivers for you is even better in many
> of their eyes.

This is probably the best reason .. look at how long it takes some companies
to even produce a beta version of a driver for their new product (creative
labs with the sblive, and adaptec with their new raid series).... I
understand that, for instance, in the case of Adaptec with their new quad
channel raid controllers, they wouldn't want to release an open source
version of their drivers, because they actually charge for the ddk... but
on the other-hand, its taking forever for them to produce a driver, and now
release it.. What's worse, is when they do release it, its being released in
binary only format .. Now how do you mount the root filesystem off the raid,
when the driver isn't loaded yet because you need to mount the root
filesystem to get at the driver? and you don't want to be stuck with a
single kernel (ie, 2.2.5 which they may release in binary form only, with
the driver built in)... all because they charge a couple bucks for the ddk
and won't open source the linux driver.

-Terry


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