Dear Sir, It is with great consternation that I discover OS-based discrimination happening within your company and within a company from which you purchase components.
It has been brought to my attention that Macronix, the manufacturer of a chip fitted in your SiPiX StyleCam Blink USB camera, provides software needed in order to obtain files in a useable format from the camera SOLELY FOR MICROSOFT WINDOWS. In other words, users of other operating systems (who are more and more numerous due to the rising cost of Microsoft products and the highly restrictive licensing policies) such as MacOS, Linux, BeOS, BSD and other forms of Unix are effectivly excluded from using your products. It has also been brought to my attention that Macronix is due to release a Software Development Kit (SDK) for Linux, which would enable Linux developers to create software providing Linux support for the above- mentioned product, and this is indeed a good step in the right direction. Do you have a release date for this SDK? A further step in the right direction would be the release of the specifications of the Macronix chip and the description of the binary data format used by the chip so that Free Software developers could write their own drivers and port them to absolutely *any* operating system. It must be made clear that keeping such information secret is, of course, Macronix's right, but reduces the chip's field of application and therefore the potential success of the product. Releasing the information, on the other hand, opens up the field of application and *every* computer user becomes a potential customer. For more details on the advantages of releasing this information, I would like to direct you to the following page: http://www.aful.org/faqs/FAQConstructeurs.en.html#id2713200 Many thanks for your time. Yours sincerely, Godwin Stewart. gstewart @ spamcop dot net Linux-Azur : http://www.linux-azur.org Désinscriptions: http://www.linux-azur.org/liste.php3 **** Pas de message au format HTML, SVP ****
