Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 19 Feb 2001 13:00:22 +0100 | From | Werner Almesberger <> | Subject | Re: [LONG RANT] Re: Linux stifles innovation... |
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Jeff Garzik wrote: > FWIW, -every single- Windows driver source code I've seen has been > bloody awful. Asking them to release that code would probably result in > embarrassment.
Maybe a good analogy is that drivers are to hardware companies like excrements are to living creatures: in order to stay alive, they have to produce them, but you don't put much love into their production, and their internals (like their development) may be a little disgusting.
> Same reasoning why many companies won't release hardware > specifications... The internal docs are bad. Really bad.
A fair number of hardware documents I have came with "here's all the material you'll need, but please don't show this to anyone" (but no NDA), which is fine with me: it doesn't complicate development in any way, and in those few cases where I really needed to share a document, they were flexible enough to allow this.
Of course, it's better if documentation is entirely in the public too, but considering the typical overhead of clearing a document for public release, I can understand why companies frequently don't do it.
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH Werner.Almesberger@epfl.ch / /_IN_N_032__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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