What you are saying certainly has credence. I worked for a Semiconducter
manufacturer here in Arizona (Microchip) as a software engineer for a number
of years. We *ALWAYS* published full information about our devices
(datasheets, etc), and it never hurt us -- because we always kept moving
forward into new technology. Rival companies often cut the top of chips off
and "map" the chip to see what others are doing. Even if they try to
implement a similar technology, it still takes months of design work,
characterization, production masking, etc. By that time, we were nearly in
production with our next-gen chipsets. The only time I can remember not
publishing information was for our Keylog products, which required an NDA.
It has been my expirience, though, that chipset manufacturers generally
*DO* publish information about devices. A quick call and a bit of social
engineering can usually get you the datasheets, or a development kit, if the
information isn't on the web. It's when these devices are applied that
things become "grey." Sometimes, the hardware combined with the software
make up the "technology advance." Such was the case with our (Microchip's)
Keylog products. It's been a number of years since I worked for them, so, I
don't know if they have "opened" it up yet or not.
Perhaps I'll have to re-think my position in the matter concerning
releasing information if I was in a competitive market. If I've spent
millions of dollars researching a given technology, I'd be hard-pressed to
immediately turn around and publish that information when I produced the
product. Perhaps that's why so many companies are putting patents on damn
near everything these days.
I'm not saying that NO drivers should be open-sourced. Personally, I'd
like to see them all (I too feel that open-sourced software is often better
than the manufacturers). However, for those companies wishing NOT to (for
whatever reason), a binary driver will do. The open source zealots view
that "everything" should be open is simply too severe.
- Steve
P.S. Funny that you should mention xfree and video drivers -- personally, I
feel that video drivers should be in the O/S domain and not in the xfree
domain...
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Matt Dillon
> Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2000 2:36 PM
> To: Steve Shoecraft
> Cc: 'Soren Schmidt'; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: RE: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
>
>
> Yes, it's a pretty sad state of affairs. What annoys me
> the most is
> that companies actually believe they are protecting something when
> they don't make their device driver source or hardware
> documentation
> available. It has been well proven for years that the
> most withholding
> accomplishes for the vast majority of these device
> drivers is a slight
> delay--- perhaps a week or two, before competitors figure out what
> they've done. Pirates don't care... they want the
> binaries anyway,
> they aren't programmers. And the open-source community has always
> strictly adhered to copyright and license restrictions.
> So all these
> companies are doing is making life harder for themselves and for
> their products. Unnecessarily. The XFree folks have
> some godaweful
> stories about the crap they've had to wade through to get video
> manufacturers on-board. Some video manufacturers have
> figured it out,
> a lot haven't.
>
> It also annoys me that certain people who should know
> better still seem
> to believe that open-source programmers are somehow
> substandard verses
> their commercial counterparts.
>
> I have one thing to say to that: Most open source
> programmers *ARE*
> professional programmers in their day jobs. We aren't
> talking about
> 14 year old wannabees here. Sure, there are lots of kids
> playing around
> with open-source systems, but don't make the mistake of
> assuming that
> these are the ones doing most of the serious kernel work.
> Most of the
> important work gets done by serious people.
>
> The quality of the open-source work tends to be much,
> much, MUCH higher
> then the quality of the programming produced by
> commercial companies,
> mainly because open-source work is opened up to peer review and
> programmers are doing it for fun, without the pressures
> of due dates
> or idiot managers. Every piece of proprietary commercial
> code I've
> ever seen has mostly been crap, and I don't expect that
> to change anytime
> soon.
>
> The paranoia of many commercial companies is misplaced.
> There are many
> classes of systems that obviously shouldn't be
> open-sourced, such as
> commercial hosted systems (e.g. most website backends),
> and many major
> programs are chock full of third-party-licensed
> technology that can't
> be redistributed (e.g. Netscape 4.x and earlier). But
> there are just
> as many that obviously should and device drivers belong for the
> most part in the latter category. I am not aiming this
> specifically
> at Dennis... each company needs to make its own decision.
> But I will
> say that the reasons Dennis states for the decision are
> mostly due to
> incorrect assumptions and paranoia and have nothing to do
> with reality.
>
> It's unfortunate, but there is light at the end of the
> tunnel. High
> technology requires young minds and old managers are
> having a harder
> and harder time dictating old paranoia to those people.
> If companies
> want quality programmers they are having to become more flexible
> and less paranoid. It is a slow process, but it is
> obviously working.
>
> -Matt
>
>
>
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