> are there any other chips in this catagory?
Many. There is a URL for a list on the web, I misplaced it.
Some of the most encountered ones are.
Sound
4-Front - 4Front Open Sound System (various chips, Commercial)
aureal - driver for soundcard
WinModem
Conexant
Intel
Lucent
Motorola (SM56)
PCTel
Display
NVidia - 3D driver for their hardware
Other
Promise - lowlevel IDE driver + software raid
Philips - compression for webcam driver
AVM - CAPI driver for passive ISDN cards
Draytek Vigor - ISDN cards
> It will help our members to avoid them in future..
But I feel that nobody should be avoided in anyway. If we think what they
do is not in the long term interest of the society, let's put
our thoughts in public review and build a consensus and convince such
vendors to release technical specification about their products so that
all open source OSes like FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD and OpenBSD can
support them.
> Buyers must be informed of these things.
> Please suggest a method to achieve to it.
Right now, when Windows is essentially free for every body, it
is very difficult to get the message through. But I think the
times are really changing for good. Microsoft seems to have
become "gravely" serious about piracy with their Windows XP
Service Pack 1. It will not be the same easy ride with
pirated windows installations.
>> Microsoft had to publicly admit that they stole large amounts of
>> code from FreeBSD Source.
> If you have more details please pass on.
I didn't pursue the subject. Some time ago MS came down heavily
on Open Source projects, with verbal contribution from one
of the VPs of Engineering. This enraged a lot of FreeBSD guys.
They combed through the Win2k code and found evidence of
the dirty act. I feel that if MS Systems have
any amount of code developed by other free projects, then those
projects are essentially working against the open software community.
BSD license is good, but not when the beneficiary is Microsoft.
Unni.
