Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 22:58:10 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: des@flood.ping.uio.no (Dag-Erling Smorgrav) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), noslenj@swbell.net (Jay Nelson), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Merger, and what will its effects be on committers? Message-ID: <200003162258.PAA12226@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <xzp8zzoieik.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> from "Dag-Erling Smorgrav" at Mar 12, 2000 01:01:07 PM
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > To get a taste of this, you should consider the situation that > > occurred when Matt Dillon sold Best Internet off, and was able > > o spend 8 hours a day hacking new code, and how a volunteer > > core was not able to keep up with reviewing it at the rate he > > was able to produce it. They throttled it back by removing, > > and then conditionalizing, his commit priviledges, something > > that wouldn't really work with several core members backing a > > commit. > > You know that's crap, Terry. Don't go there. You'll only start off a > new flamewar. And you quoting it back as "flamebait" won't... but now that you have achieved your goal of goading me into justifying my comments, let me lay it out for you: Riddle me this, Batman: What is the difference between FreeBSD -current not working because it won't compile because there is no compile-before-commit requirement and no reader-locking on CVS mirroring, and FreeBSD -current not working because Garret Wollman is making networking changes, John Dyson is making VM changes, someone is importing an entirely new SCSI system, or Matt Dillon is in the middle of making VM changes? As a consumer of the source tree, all I see are two states: 1) It works 2) It's broken Any argument about why it's in state #2 is pretty much as useful as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. > > Finally, there's some concern about proprietary drivers not > > being available for the free version, and displacing freely > > available drivers in the free version, leaving no free > > alternatives. > > Judging from what currently publicly known, the only "proprietary > drivers" not "available for the free version" will be those written > under NDA, i.e. those drivers for which there is no free equivalent in > the first place. Remember that you opened this can of worms... OK, Gendanken experiment time: IBM has a RAID controller for which an IBM employee has written a driver, for which source code can not be released. 1) Will FreeBSD be able to utilize this driver, if it is released in binary form by IBM? In other words, are the powers that be going to allow FreeBSD to use binary only driver in a kernel build, and are they going to permit the changes to FreeBSD necessary to support this build process to be committed to FreeBSD's source tree? Assume the answer to that one is "yes". 2) Given that BSDI has binary-only drivers, the source for which can not be released because of NDA, are the binary object files, linkable to a FreeBSD kernel using the process outlined in #1, going to be made available for use in FreeBSD? 3) Given new hardware under NDA, when the hardware is no longer under NDA because the Linux camp have done our jobs for us, and gotten documentation released, or have written a driver without documentation, will the NDA driver then be released? 4) If the answer is "no", then will the powers that be permit a driver written using the Linux driver as a reference to be committed to the FreeBSD tree, as has occurred with other drivers in the past? 5) Say a division of IBM uses FreeBSD, and a driver for IBM hardware is written under NDA, and the answer to any of #1, #2, or #3 is "no". Will the division of IBM be forced to use BSDI, or not have a driver for hardware obtained from a different division of IBM, with which the first division has no political clout? As I said, there is some concern about these issues. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200003162258.PAA12226>