> -----Original Message----- > From: David Boyes [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 3:17 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: LCS drivers for 2.4.9 ? > >
> > Keep in mind that Red Hat and Linux are not synonymous > (marketing efforts to > the contrary). It's not a distribution issue, it's an > intellectual property > issue. IBM feels they need to protect the IP in the OSAs, and > that's their > right to decide. If I come into your house and tell you I > need your nifty > new TV set for free, are you prepared to give it to me? Thought not. > Nope, but I'm free to go buy some piece of hardware that isn't tied up with intellectual property "issues". In other words, is the mainframe really worth all of this? From the testing I've done, I'm not convinced... a cluster full of inexpensive Intel boxes seems faster and cheaper to me, and doesn't carry the baggage of hardware written to run an OS that is completely foreign to Linux (OS/390). For example, with a cluster of PCs, each machine can have *GASP!* a console that actually works with vi. > I think the fastest way to solve this problem is to volunteer > a team of > programmers to go to an IBM facility, sign away their > first-born children in > terms of NDAs, and rewrite the OSA and QDIO drivers to have a portable > interface that would be acceptable to the kernal development > folks. I'll > volunteer to pay a resource to do this -- if there are others > reading this > that are willing to do the same, I think we can make this > work (certainly > given that a number of the subscribers of this list work for > big software > companies that do this kind of development, we chip in a bit, > give Neale, > Rick, and Ross an all-expenses-paid week in Poughkeepsie), > and we should > have something we (both the community and IBM) like at the end. This could be a temporary solution, until some bug in the binary bit of code cause it a) not to build properly or b) not to function properly. Then we are right back to bitching and IBM to fix it. Do not underestimate the knowledge and power of many developers writing Open Source code. Again, I'd like to point out that all of this fuss is over an ETHERNET driver. If I had my cluster of PCs, I would have a) more open ethernet hardware and b) MUCH CHEAPER ethernet hardware > > I'd like to ask the IBMers to see whether this would be > possible. I'll work > on getting backing, or arranging a resource of my own. I would applaude such an effort as a stop-gap measure, it's not the ideal situation though. > > Getting angry or railing at IBM won't help either. Putting a concrete > proposal up front to IBM that has some definable business > value will go > somewhere. No, but voting with my feet (and dollars) might ;) > > -- db >
