Re: wikipedia article
* Constantine A. Murenin [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2006-06-12 15:07]: On 11/06/06, Hamorszky Balazs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm looking for some help on an article on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_operating_systems Whilst there, what about another important article that seems to have a Linux POV? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Open_Source_Wireless_Drivers ;) No just expand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blob to add a proper definition for Binary Blob as that last entry on the page there. -Bob ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adaptec AAC raid support
...deliberately breaking OpenBSD's support for Adaptec hardware as some sort of ultimatum is a childish and self-destructive action. I hope the other OpenBSD committers veto any such action as being counterproductive and harmful to your users. Horsecookies. What was done was remove AAC support from GENERIC, because users know what is in GENERIC is supposed to be stable and a good candidate for use. I've got AAC's. They aren't at the moment. they die, and you can't do anything with the raid management without rebooting, and Adaptec has shown no signs of releasing documentation so that situation can be corrected. Sure, there's a free driver, and a non-free management interface, so it's only half a driver. Pretending to have a production system using a raid card that with no supportable management interface so you have to reboot to fix anything is like buying birth control pills in packs of 20. Pretty soon you're going to take a good fucking on a day you really can't afford it. Period. As such AAC isnt' any more broken than it ever was. OpenBSD just chooses not to encourage users to purchase a non-supportable card by including support for it in the GENERIC kernel. Are you saying it's more honest to leave unstable and incomplete support in there? People who wish to use it anyway can always compile it in. Otherwise, you're likely to discover that most people choose to run an OS which works with the hardware they have, rather than sticking with OpenBSD. Or choose to replace the hardware that isn't supportable by the OS they want to run. Thank you LSI and Dell. LSI cards seem to work fine. -Bob ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adaptec AAC raid support
you guys want to produce fully open and unencumbered stuff. That's wonderful. But why is it so important to go around screaming and yelling about it and alientating those who do try to help? Let me tell you, Doug is about the most positive and supportive guy you'll ever have at Adaptec, pissing him off really won't produce results. Why is it so important to drag your users into your political fights by depriving them of stuff that works now but isn't exactly everything that you want? I'd love to have fully open stuff from all the RAID companies too, but I also want the users of FreeBSD to be able to use the resources that are out there to their full advantage and not be pinned down by my political beliefs on the subject. Actually Scott it's rather simple, As long as projects are willing to have someone sign an NDA and be a shill for the vendors, you end up with vendors who wish to hide everything behind an NDA and produce binary only stuff. I as a user don't want that, and plain and simple, I just bought 27 LSI cards for that reason - I don't want to wait for non-free support to show up, and I don't want to have to wedge in some binary only thing after the fact. I want it to work with the OS, and be installed with it. When vendors have the option to close their product and have some few designated souls who will act as their shills and put in a non-free layer for a free os, then they don't release docs, and everyone suffers with poor support - with a driver that doesn't work by default in the OS, because it can't be included. With a driver that isn't redistributable in commercial spinoffs, because it can't be included. With a driver that I can't install onto, because it can't be included on the install sets. Basically, the binary only closed source nda stuff sucks, just like the altheros driver. I don't see supporting a verdor making a decision to NDA their product by finding ways to sneak non-free support in as productive, Actually, I see that this harms the free community, and harms it an awful lot. because now this vendor instead of providing documentation so the free community can truly have community support for this product, gets to pay lip service to the free os world and say sure we are supported by free operating systems when really they aren't. Involving the user community makes sure the user community knows what the score is, and knows what products to buy (case in point, my recent purchase of 27 LSI adapters, rather than Adaptec). I think letting the user community believe that a company is fully supportive of free operating systems when they really are not is dishonest to the user community, and screws them in the end when they make bad purchasing decisions. I think a company has every right to have a closed source, binary only driver. I think the user community has the right to know about that, ask for better, and if they don't like it, know to vote with their feet. I for one don't want to see a situation where I can't install an OS on a scsi controller without resorting to 3rd party special license packages, or at least, not on a controller I've paid good money for. -Bob ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adaptec AAC raid support
Sorry, I got suckered into a side argument about why the kernel driver in OpenBSD sucks. Yes, the management app is closed, but the driver is open. And if the OpenBSD driver sucks and people want it to stop crashing and don't want to go beating their heads against the wall at Adaptec asking for driver specs, then they are welcome to come ask me for info. My point is that I'm offering direct help in this area. My suspicion is that political goals are more important than making the driver work. A driver without the management portion of it is really crippled, it's incomplete, at that point, why run it? you're just asking to get hosed at the wrong time. While I appreciate the offer to help fix the half driver, we need the other half for it to be really something we should be including in GENERIC and telling users they should buy and run -Bob ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: aac support
Of course, sooner or later someone will kindly point them in the direction of electronic documentation, in which case I'm sure they'll come up with the oops, our Acrobat licence expired-excuse. Your flippant reply, doesn't illustrate the source of the real problem. Companies in the U.S. are driven by two things, Public customer feedback, and a collection of Lawyers, Accounants, Marketing Types, and other Feather Merchants. Normally the second collection of idiots decides what the company should be doing based on it's notion of whatever they can do to achieve customer traction - the best description of what that is is the friction between the customers knees and elbows and the floor when they're in a favorable position for the company. Companies taken over by this sort of evil will inevitably do as little as possible, and release as little as possible, unless forced. they know they have ot at least pay lip service to free software, but now the latest trend is to find a willing shill who will sign an NDA, produce a binary only layer so they don't have to release full documentation, Why? because their lawyers and marketing types don't think it's important, and won't, ever, unless customers say so. Otherwise sane people in the company will be unable or unwilling to fight the pit vipers unless there is ammunition from the commnity to support it. Projects welcoming support for hardware that can only be supported in this way encourage this sort of thing continuing. While I understant and empathize with the attitude of a developer who wants to do this to help people whose hardware otherwise wouldn't work at all, making support work partially, or via NDA, removes the pressure from the company to release stuff so their hardware is supportable. The free os can now say that it supports it, so the users think they are happier. The company can now pay lip service publicly to say we support free os's - the fact that they really don't is completely lost on the customers. Who loses? the free software community as a whole. OpenBSD has a definate stance againse this sort of binary only layer support. FreeBSD now seems to be incorporating binary only support into it's kernel, which is kind of sad, but that's their choice. I think customers of these companies need to stand up and be counted to say that they don't like hardware that can only be fully supported under NDA. Only vocal customer feedback lets the sane people within a company fight the lawyers and other bottom feeders to do the right thing. I think people should be asking if they want to use hardware like this, and if they really want it supported by default. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with a piece of hardware that says NDA only - run windows, or a particular version of linux that you can load our driver on. But I don't think a free OS should encourage this by including support for this, so users think they are buying supported hardware when they really are buying a ball and chain. -Bob ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adaptec AAC raid support
I'm not stuffing anything down anyone's throats. I'm enabling FreeBSD users to use the resources that are available to them. That's quite different than cancelling developer work and threatening to remove a driver due to a political dispute. Freedom isn't about coercing others to believe the same things that I believe. Actually Scott, there's exactly the problem. While I'm sure you think that providing a binary only management tool helps FreeBSD users who have this hardware, I think it's rather the opposite. Let me put it in another light: Let's say an ethernet card vendor closes off and puts under NDA the interface to their card's control mechanisms. you can have a free driver to recieve and send packets, but in order to set an address, or configure the card, you can't use ifconfig, you have to use a proprietary binary only program that can't be included with the OS, and doesn't work on anything but i386. Would having support in there for that particular ethernet card, and encouraging users to buy more of them really be helping FreeBSD users in the long run, or hurting them? Or perhaps it would it be helping the vendor's lawyers to have ammunition to keep documentation from being released, and hurting the user community in the long run. -Bob ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
