Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 13:53:21 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Bob Beck" <beck@bofh.cns.ualberta.ca>, "Bram Van Dam" <bramspam@pandora.be> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: aac support Message-ID: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNIEMPFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20050319214407.GL22961@bofh.cns.ualberta.ca>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Bob Beck > Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2005 1:44 PM > To: Bram Van Dam > Cc: misc@cvs.openbsd.org; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: aac support > > > > > 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. > Bob, Your missing something. One of the big reasons the companies want to have NDA's and binary-only drivers is because they know that a binary driver may break with future versions of the OS. So eventually the new version of FreeBSD will have some internal change that breaks AAC support, and the developer that had the NDA for AAC support won't be around any longer, and that card will then become worthless. And so then the userbase has to go buy a new card. And the cycle repeats all over again. How many people have basements full of boxes of perfectly good hardware peripherals that work just a good as the brand new peripherals, but they can't use because the manufacturer didn't release drivers for the new OSes? Ted
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