"Mike A. Harris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Excellent post Mike. You hit all the important points and I agree with 99% of what you said, except the following:
> (Try calling any video hardware vendor on the telephone for *any* > operating system, including Microsoft Windows and tell them your > video card is crashing and you think it is a driver bug. Watch how > fast every vendor out there will tell you that they do not provide > end user support.) The above is not true for IBM OS/2. If you are an IBM OS/2 customers you can call up IBM and file a bug report with IBM about the video support. Eventually this bug report will find it's way into the IBM CMVCC bug tracking system, to the video support group and then into the SciTech bugzilla database. Then on monday morning IBM bitches at me about the new bug in our database, and asks if we can reproduce it. If we can, we fix it and send them a new build which finds it ways back to the customer for testing and eventually makes it's way into the next official code drop they provide to their customers. If we can reproduce it, we spend (usually a considerable amount of time!) going back and forth with the customer, their test labs and our QA staff until we can reproduce the bug, then we fix it and deliver the fix to IBM. Sure, the process is long winded, but the bugs *do* get fixed ;-). On average though we get very few bug reports this way, primarily because we usually find the bugs during our extensive QA process or if we miss it IBM catches in their own test labs. And the OS/2 product is deployed by many large IBM customers who have one single driver running across their entire enterprise, consiting of thousands to hundreds of thousands of machines all running potentially different graphics cards. Recently we fixed a nasty long standing bug that affected one customer who had 17,000 machines running the same graphics card, causing them to have lockups once every 5-6 reboots. Fun stuff ;-) If you are wondering what my point in all this is, the point is simple. Companies like IBM do fix bugs in drivers for their customers, but their customers pay for this service, and companies like mine get paid to provide that service. It doesn't come free and my company couldn't possibly do this for free on a volunteer basis either. Oh, and companies like ATI, Intel and Matrox are nearly always completely out of the loop in this equation, except to provide the specs and answer the occasional question. Regards, --- Kendall Bennett Chief Executive Officer SciTech Software, Inc. Phone: (530) 894 8400 http://www.scitechsoft.com ~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology! ~ _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
