From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Oct 18 19:52:28 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from smtp006pub.verizon.net (smtp006pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.185]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0C7B737B401; Thu, 18 Oct 2001 19:51:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from bellatlantic.net (pool-151-198-135-141.mad.east.verizon.net [151.198.135.141]) by smtp006pub.verizon.net with ESMTP ; id f9J2oas20977 Thu, 18 Oct 2001 21:50:37 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <3BCF94FB.50F5D295@bellatlantic.net> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 22:50:35 -0400 From: Sergey Babkin Reply-To: babkin@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 4.0-19990626-CURRENT i386) X-Accept-Language: en, ru MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Doug Hass , Leo Bicknell , Jim Bryant , MurrayTaylor , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FYI References: <000001c1578a$f7962480$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > > >From: Doug Hass [mailto:dhass@imagestream.com] > >The lack of flexibility in accepting various requirements illustrates the > >difference between an OS WITH legs in the market and one WITHOUT legs. > > > >Much to my chagrin, FreeBSD continues to fall more and more into the > >latter category. > > > > This is a gross simplification of a great many issues. I fail to see why you > feel that FreeBSD is threatening anyone's IP and I don't understand why you > are reacting this way. Any company is free to take the FreeBSD distribution > and customize it the way they want and include any proprietary and binary code > they > want and hand out distributions as they see fit. Imagestream could do this Well, honestly, FreeBSD makes the life of the developers of third-party binary-only drivers fairly difficult. The reason is that there are a lot of API changes happening between the releases (take Julian Elisher's recent problem for example). So the driver writers are forced to at least recompile their drivers for each release. Plus people are very active at ripping away the old APIs even when there is no immediate need for that nor benefit from it (think of phk's removal of the LIST-something macros). So often not a simple recompilation but a noticeable rewrite may be required for a driver between different versions of FreeBSD. That actually is true not only for the drivers but for the usual binaries too. For example, there seems to be no way to combine COFF and ELF libraries into one executable. That made porting of Lyx to 4.0 unfeasible, as the binary-only Xforms library it used was at the time available in the COFF form only. And I haven't found how to build even purely COFF binaries on an ELF-ized system either. ALl this is a significant pain for everyone porting their software to FreeBSD and much stronger yet for those doing binary-only distributions. Maybe we should have an official policy of keeping the things compatible and available for as long as possible even if they are considered obsolete, unless carrying them on requires a major effort. -SB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message