Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 23 Feb 2002 07:42:10 -0500 (EST) | From | "Mark H. Wood" <> | Subject | RE: Dlink DSL PCI Card |
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There oughta be a page somewhere on "How to Sell your Product in the Linux Market".
On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Dave Rattay [ITeX] wrote: > I definitely agree that our worlds do not match. While I would hate > to lose any customers there are some things that can not be avoided. > There are many things to be taken into consideration when we make our > drivers. One the vast majority of our customers use Windows and > therefore we must devote most of our time there.
Understood.
> Second when a new OS > comes out from Microsoft (such as XP) we are given beta copies 6 months > in advance so that our drivers hit the market along side the new OS > release. This just doesn't happen with Linux.
Sure it does. It happens right here on LKML and some other lists. You can get early-release images of Linux 2.5 right now. The distribution builders won't pick up 2.5 for many months.
> I agree that this would > be much simpler if the source code was released and we had "help" in > driver development but as I said that just can't happen, end of story. > Now as to specs for the board itself you can check with sales because I > am not even sure what our policy is on that and I wish you luck in those > regards.
Board spec.s are largely irrelevant. It's *chip* spec.s that driver writers need most. There's no such thing as board drivers for Linux, but there are a number of chipset drivers. For example, under Windows there's a separate driver for each company's NE2000 clone, but under Linux the ne driver handles them all. Board-level differences are usually dismissed as "quirks", if they are significant at all.
(Stores need to understand this too. A lot of sales have gone to one rather than another because store B told me what chipset was used in a board-level product, and store A would not.)
-- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@IUPUI.Edu Our lives are forever changed. But *that* is exactly as it always was.
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