Martin Hoevenaar on Mon Feb 6 13:40:03 UTC 2006: > ... I see that you're hardwork together with > all the people involved and understand there is a > need to address hardware producers to include, > at least, the sourcecode of the drivers > for their hardware on the cd that comes in the box with it.
> After looking at many of the producer's websites > and digging for answers, there seems to be a lack of > knowledge or interest in doing so. Maybe commercial > reasons are the base for that, I don't know. My > question is: is there a forum or a group of people > that tries to motivate these producers for including > all things needed to run the equipment? > My guess is that it is for their and the user's > interest a good thing by doing so. Great! Politics! I like politics! :) Martin, you are absolutely right. All HW should come with HW manuals like IBM PC came back in 80's. I have still around some great pieces of totally obsolete computer stuff like Ohio Scinetific computer with three processors (Z80/6502/6809), Osborne I, Commodore +4, several terminals. All with circuit diagrams, many with SW listings, detailed HW manuals. That was great time back then. Unfortunately it seems that those days are over, at least temporarily. It turned out that no-one actually makes lots and lots of money of selling expensive stuff and maintining them. The new recipe was to overload every place with piles of cheap junk that can be thrown out of door and will never be seen again. And we are living in this junk culture now. There is a premise that everything must be kept secret because of competitive reasons but it turns out that is not the real reason. I can deduce that from the fact that even stuff that has turned obsolete already years back is still kept secret. The real reason is that no-one is anymore making documents that could be handed out as HW references and quality of commercially produced SW is often so shoddy that no company in its right mind wants anyone to see it naked. And because of that all, lots of useful stuff becomes unusable as the environments change, old SW becomes unusable even though HW were still quite OK. That way we end up trashing loads of perfectly good stuff. An example of those are the winprinters with proprietary drivers for which no updates are available. (Luckily I have still 15 years old Laserjet with PS cartridge around and can still get toner for it...) So yes, there are commercial reasons behind the current state of affairs. But those are not the trade secret reasons. Everything is pretty much made of standard components and people with enough money can actually buy the specs from the manufacturers of those components. The real reasons are that, in fact, no documentation is made any more and therefore is not available, and that no-one really makes money by maintaing old stuff, but only by selling new which must be manufactured very very cheaply. I feel that a change is coming to that, but I'm afraid it will take some decade or two. The change will come because it will turn out that this junk culture is not sustainable. And therefore incentives in froms of taxes or consumer reactions will force the HW makers to make their gadgets maintainable again, in which phase they will figure it out that, in fact it will be cheaper to publish the specs and hand over the SW maintenance to open SW community rather than doing it in house. So I see great times ahead, but it may take some time to get there. With best regards, Lauri Pirttiaho Oulu Finland ................................................................... Luukku Plus paketilla p??set eroon tila- ja turvallisuusongelmista. Hanki Luukku Plus ja helpotat el?m??si. http://www.mtv3.fi/luukku
