Lyle Merdan wrote:
After talking to some people it doesn't look like the QLA2100 or QLA2200 HBA drivers would be made opensource for opensolaris. There just is not a good business case to open the source code for either family of HBAs on Solaris.
Lyle, we have licensing agreements with QLogic which prevent us from providing the source to the qlc driver. Ditto for Emulex and JNI/AMCC. If we were able to re-draw the agreements to provide the sourcecode for these cards and drivers, then we would do so.
If someone wants an open source driver they are stuck with Linux. As Sun can attest there is a HUGE financial burden to going from closed source to open source. For the 50-100 customers who might use it within a hobby environment there is no benefit to QLogic other than keeping some people from being disappointed. There are a lot more downfalls to opening the source than letting the old product die. Once you open the source to EOLed products you get people calling support for help with compiling, and diagnosing if a card is bad, this is especially true with the cards that have lasers as the lasers do have a limited lifespan. Those calls tie up a lot of resources than can be spent on customers who purchase current products. Let's not forget about how many OEMs that QLogic has for it's HBAs. There is a perceived risk of cutting into the sales of those OEMs, and additional load on their support centers. Now don't boo me though. I'm just laying out the downside of changing the way things are.
What we are doing (and you'll see this within the next few weeks) is that we are opensourcing as much of the NWS (aka san) consolidation as we possiibly can. The limitations, once again, are the licensing agreements. James C. McPherson -- Solaris Datapath Engineering Data Management Group Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
