Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 14:44:07 -0700 From: Bob Beck <beck@bofh.cns.ualberta.ca> To: Bram Van Dam <bramspam@pandora.be> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: aac support Message-ID: <20050319214407.GL22961@bofh.cns.ualberta.ca> In-Reply-To: <423C8CD3.4010004@pandora.be> References: <200503191927.j2JJRn25021821@cvs.openbsd.org> <423C7FC8.1020407@samsco.org> <18f601940503191216685b2e16@mail.gmail.com> <423C8CD3.4010004@pandora.be>
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> Of course, sooner or later someone will kindly point them in the > direction of electronic documentation, in which case I'm sure they'll > come up with the "oops, our Acrobat licence expired"-excuse. Your flippant reply, doesn't illustrate the source of the real problem. Companies in the U.S. are driven by two things, Public customer feedback, and a collection of Lawyers, Accounants, Marketing Types, and other Feather Merchants. Normally the second collection of idiots decides what the company should be doing based on it's notion of whatever they can do to achieve "customer traction" - the best description of what that is is the friction between the customers knees and elbows and the floor when they're in a favorable position for the company. Companies taken over by this sort of evil will inevitably do as little as possible, and release as little as possible, unless forced. they know they have ot at least pay lip service to free software, but now the latest trend is to find a willing shill who will sign an NDA, produce a "binary only" layer so they don't have to release full documentation, Why? because their lawyers and marketing types don't think it's important, and won't, ever, unless customers say so. Otherwise sane people in the company will be unable or unwilling to fight the pit vipers unless there is ammunition from the commnity to support it. Projects welcoming support for hardware that can only be supported in this way encourage this sort of thing continuing. While I understant and empathize with the attitude of a developer who wants to do this to help people whose hardware otherwise wouldn't work at all, making support work partially, or via NDA, removes the pressure from the company to release stuff so their hardware is supportable. The "free" os can now say that it supports it, so the users think they are happier. The company can now pay lip service publicly to say "we support free os's" - the fact that they really don't is completely lost on the customers. Who loses? the free software community as a whole. OpenBSD has a definate stance againse this sort of binary only layer support. FreeBSD now seems to be incorporating binary only support into it's kernel, which is kind of sad, but that's their choice. I think customers of these companies need to stand up and be counted to say that they don't like hardware that can only be fully supported under NDA. Only vocal customer feedback lets the sane people within a company fight the lawyers and other bottom feeders to do the right thing. I think people should be asking if they want to use hardware like this, and if they really want it supported by default. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with a piece of hardware that says "NDA only - run windows, or a particular version of linux that you can load our driver on". But I don't think a free OS should encourage this by including support for this, so users think they are buying supported hardware when they really are buying a ball and chain. -Bob
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