On Thursday 08 August 2002 07:52 pm, Leon Brooks wrote: > No, I don't. But it _is_ a totally bogus excuse. Their competitors _will_ > be clean-rooming their chips and disassembling their drivers anyway.
I very much doubt that - it's too hard and too expensive. It's hard enough to write drivers, and even harder to disassemble them. It's easier to develop your own, I would think. But when you have full access to the source code, it's a different story. > It's > one of those if-you-outlaw-guns-then-only-outlaws-will-have-guns problems. > As things stand, *only* their competitors have access to their `secrets' > and not you or I, not their more-or-less friends! What could be a worse > situation than that? Better to also give their allies access, no? Well, they won't really care; if their competitors do reverse engineer their drivers, they will pay double for the drivers and will be left with a technology that's a generation old. It's kinda like the joke about stealing computer blueprints... by the time you steal them, they're already outdated. The goal is to make it harder - it's just like security screws and warranty stickers on hardware. > Some point-haired-boss moron lawyer makes that decision, not someone with > their brains actually operating. Yes, but that's the reality. An OEM won't permit their techies to distribute drivers if it's not ok with the lawyerbots. -- -- Igor
