Re: aac support
* Theo de Raadt [2005-03-19 20:27 -0700] We do it all the time! We mail a vendor, and then we start a frank dialogue. I (or some other developer, maybe even Bill Paul from FreeBSD (Mr. Ethernet)... anyways, people like that.. ) explain the business case to the vendor. They almost always understand, and then give us documentation. Sometimes they open the documentation wide up! Seems to me that you need to get in contact with the stock holders of these companies. I do not know too much about the USA, but in Norway everyone who owns (any number of) stock in any public company, have a legal right to attend the general assembly that such companies are legally bound to organize every year. As a stock holder you hva ethe right to both speak at the general assembly and to propose a case trialed and to demand a issue to be considered and dealt with. Why not buy exactly one (1) stock in each and every hardware company there is in the USA? Show up, speak to the audience (the other stock holders), and have your case heard. Also, the stock holder register is probably also open to the public, which mean you could contact each and every one of the other stock holders and let them hear your case. I am sure Adaptec (or any other company) would want to listen to their owners. But then again; what do I know about business? Svein Halvor ___ 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
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tobias Weingartner Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2005 9:54 PM To: Sean Hafeez Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: aac support On Saturday, March 19, Sean Hafeez wrote: There has got to be a better way to work with the vendors in order to get the support we need. It just seem to me that the screw you guys, I am going home stuff just does not work. Other approaches have been tried. Extensively, and for a long time. If you know of an approach that works, please demonstrate. At this point, I believe that the community would welcome someone that is going to step up, and have adaptec supply the documentation because they negotiated it out of them. Words here are cheap... but at the current time, they are the only thing we really have left. The voice of the community. The vendors need a business case in order to do things - they are in business to make money and I can agree with that. They have a business case. More than one. 1800+ cards is not a business case? The points I brought up are not a business case? The bad press and such are not a business case? Give me a break. --Toby. I work for one of these vendors. I know the release of documentation on one of the RAID controllers this company shipped for several years was not based on logic, let alone a $ amount. The decision was left to a single manager who waffled back and forth about whether the information should be released. The engineer who was pushing for the docs to be available eventually published them on a web site, indicating his company email address as a point of contact. It was a gutsy, yet arbitrary decision on his part that led to the opening of docs. After the release of the docs, the company started publishing their 'friedliness' to OSS. My experience tells me the only way to get the attention of people in a large company like Adaptec is to take drastic measures. If this means emailing people who can affect change until they are sufficiently annoyed to make a decision one way or another, so be it. It is most likely one of the few methods that will work. There is most likely a single person who will make the decision and it may boil down to whether they are having a good day or not. If their response is 'no', it will be stated that this is due to 'contractual obligations', 'intellectual property', 'on the advice of our lawyers..' or some other rubbish. As a user of OpenBSD, I am glad to see this stance taken (again). The people I admire in life are the people that stand up for their principles and are true to themselves and their beliefs. The people I despise are those that gladly sacrifice their stated beliefs to increase their wealth or comfort. OpenBSD does not support all of the hw I use. This is due to some of the hw being 'closed'. Some of it is not supported because the developers have not had enough interest in writing the driver. I did what I could by providing hw to some of the developers in the hope that it will be supported one day. Some of this hw is made by the company I work for, but it had to be provided out of my pocket because the company is too short sighted to see the benefit of providing hw to the OpenBSD team. They do freely use OpenSSH in a number of products however... It is unpopular these days to speak directly on issues. In my lowly opinion, Theo can be abrasive at times and I do not always agree with him. He seems to be morally and intellectually honest, and this is rare. The operating system he and the rest of the developers have given to us is true to their stated goals and has served me very well. For all of these reasons, I stand behind the OpenBSD team and will add Adaptec to the list of vendors I will not use or recommend (Intel, Broadcom, etc). mark ___ 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
Mark Keating wrote: -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tobias Weingartner Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2005 9:54 PM To: Sean Hafeez Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: aac support On Saturday, March 19, Sean Hafeez wrote: There has got to be a better way to work with the vendors in order to get the support we need. It just seem to me that the screw you guys, I am going home stuff just does not work. Other approaches have been tried. Extensively, and for a long time. If you know of an approach that works, please demonstrate. At this point, I believe that the community would welcome someone that is going to step up, and have adaptec supply the documentation because they negotiated it out of them. Words here are cheap... but at the current time, they are the only thing we really have left. The voice of the community. The vendors need a business case in order to do things - they are in business to make money and I can agree with that. They have a business case. More than one. 1800+ cards is not a business case? The points I brought up are not a business case? The bad press and such are not a business case? Give me a break. --Toby. I work for one of these vendors. I know the release of documentation on one of the RAID controllers this company shipped for several years was not based on logic, let alone a $ amount. The decision was left to a single manager who waffled back and forth about whether the information should be released. The engineer who was pushing for the docs to be available eventually published them on a web site, indicating his company email address as a point of contact. It was a gutsy, yet arbitrary decision on his part that led to the opening of docs. After the release of the docs, the company started publishing their 'friedliness' to OSS. My experience tells me the only way to get the attention of people in a large company like Adaptec is to take drastic measures. If this means emailing people who can affect change until they are sufficiently annoyed to make a decision one way or another, so be it. It is most likely one of the few methods that will work. There is most likely a single person who will make the decision and it may boil down to whether they are having a good day or not. If their response is 'no', it will be stated that this is due to 'contractual obligations', 'intellectual property', 'on the advice of our lawyers..' or some other rubbish. As a user of OpenBSD, I am glad to see this stance taken (again). The people I admire in life are the people that stand up for their principles and are true to themselves and their beliefs. The people I despise are those that gladly sacrifice their stated beliefs to increase their wealth or comfort. OpenBSD does not support all of the hw I use. This is due to some of the hw being 'closed'. Some of it is not supported because the developers have not had enough interest in writing the driver. I did what I could by providing hw to some of the developers in the hope that it will be supported one day. Some of this hw is made by the company I work for, but it had to be provided out of my pocket because the company is too short sighted to see the benefit of providing hw to the OpenBSD team. They do freely use OpenSSH in a number of products however... It is unpopular these days to speak directly on issues. In my lowly opinion, Theo can be abrasive at times and I do not always agree with him. He seems to be morally and intellectually honest, and this is rare. The operating system he and the rest of the developers have given to us is true to their stated goals and has served me very well. For all of these reasons, I stand behind the OpenBSD team and will add Adaptec to the list of vendors I will not use or recommend (Intel, Broadcom, etc). mark I just wanted to echo your assertion that the decision to release documentation is often arbitrary, and almost always misinformed on the part of the decision maker(s). Recently, I've been involved in an off list conversation with Theo largely on this issue. Off list only because I needed to introduce myself to him, and didn't want to bore the world with personal details. However, a little on list boring might be useful at this point. I'm heavily involved with digital intellectual property but I'm also a programmer. As a result, I can usually understand and speak the various languages with the various parties in such a way they can actually understand what each party is concerned with. I've found that surprisingly the various groups controlling access to technical information in companies really in fact do not understand the issues involved very well. In my experience programmers can't communicate well with managers, managers can't communicate well with lawyers, and lawyers can't
aac support
re: http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10032offset=15rows=28 See a posting from Scott Long of FreeBSD; --- Thanks for going to a public forum and saying I am full of crap. I really appreciate that. Boy, you sure do want to see all of our projects do well, don't you. Apparently you have zero idea of where we are going. While you are content with shipping binary stuff in your source tree and in your ports tree, we are not. We do not ship binaries. We are not interested in shipping a binary for some CLI. We actually do have the Linux CLI working in emulation, but we will not supply it to our user community. I have cancelled that effort by that developer. We will not supply something to our user community that they cannot fix and improve themselves. We have been talking with Adaptec for 4 months. They have not given us management information. We have been talking to Adaptec for more than a year to get other RAID controller information, as in, how to even get the mailbox stuff fixed. They have not given that to us, either. Noone thought to talk to you. You are, I am sure, under a non-disclosure agreement with Adaptec, and I am sure you would therefore not give us documentation. We are quite used to FreeBSD and Linux people signing NDA's by now. Yesterday on the phone Doug said But we did give OpenBSD documentation, we gave them to Scott Long. Thus, Doug mentioned that *you* had documentation, and thought that was enough. Of course it is not. You do not help us, I told him. That is not how it works. And so it stands -- we still have no documentation. Did I get an offer from you for documentation before you went onto a public site and said I was full of crap? No, I did not. And I expect that now that you have said I am full of crap, we still will get no documentation from you. Right? We are working on a driver-independent raid management framework. One command (perhaps called raidctl(4), we don't know) that should work on any controller from any vendor, which would do management, because the management stuff would be abstracted in a driver-independent way into each driver. Yes this is a difficult project. We have support for AMI almost working. We will support some other product, as well, then we'll see where Adaptec stands. I do a lot of work on OpenBSD. I am sure that you do a lot of work on your stuff in FreeBSD too, so you know what it is to be a very busy busy person. When a vendor ignores me and the efforts of 4 other people trying to get the vendor to listen -- for that long, we have no choice. Yet, you, Scott, you think that you are therefore able to slag us and call us wrong, because YOU are in the loop and we are not? Because you used to WORK at Adaptec, and we did not? That somehow makes us full of crap? I have been watching the mail going to Doug over the last 24 hours. I have been counting controllers mentioned in mails and am now up to over 1,800 Adaptec RAID controllers, with people from very large commercial operations complaining that they have been switching to other controllers (or, having now seen Adaptec's failure in this regard, that they will now actively not buy Adaptec again). Those controllers will not be supported in OpenBSD 3.7 in May. If Adaptec wishes them to be supported in a future release, they had better come and make amends. We are sick of supporting the hardware of vendors who shit on their customers via us. Maybe they can repair this horrid situation enough that we will once again support their controllers by the time OpenBSD 3.8 ships in November. Quite frankly, you don't understand what we are trying to do, and Scott, this is just like the binary only Atheros driver that FreeBSD ships. I like it when all hardware is supported with source code, but just because our methods for getting there are different than yours, Scott, that gives you absolutely no right to go posting such a thing as you did there. Shame on you. ___ 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
To make it easier for people to find Scott Long's post to osnews.com here it is in full: --- Direct comment link From a BSD and former Adaptec person... By Scott (IP: ---.samsco.org) - Posted on 2005-03-19 19:02:37 I don't know if it's better to post this here or onto the openbsd-misc list, but anyways First, Theo is full of crap. I'll say that again: Theo is full of crap. I don't think that he's actually interested in making the AAC cards work. Instead, I think that he's interested in stirring controversy, petty bullying, and silly 'freedom' tripe. I worked at Adaptec for almost five years, until last year. I worked on the FreeBSD (and Linux) AAC driver, and I ported the AAC management CLI to FreeBSD. It's available right now in the FreeBSD ports tree. I also added the proper shims to the driver so that the Linux AACCLI would work under emulation. The fact that I did these things is pretty well known in the BSD community; several other projects have contacted me over the years for help and information about AAC. But during the time the Theo claims that he's cared about AAC, he NEVER ONCE CONTACTED ME! If he had come to me before I left and asked for help on making all of this AAC stuff work on OpenBSD, I would have been happy to help him. Heck, I might have even ported the AACCLI for him on my own. Unfortuntely, Theo chose to ignore resources that would have helped him, and instead chose his normal super-confrontational antics. I have to commend Doug Richardson (one of the nicest men I've ever worked with, BTW) for his very appropriate response. If Adaptec provides an open SDK later this year, good for them, but it certainly is not due to Theo. Theo could have had AACCLI support years ago, but chose not to. I hope he removes the driver from the tree. That would really teach everyone how mature and 'right' he is. Scott Long ___ 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
Theo de Raadt wrote: re: http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10032offset=15rows=28 See a posting from Scott Long of FreeBSD; --- Thanks for going to a public forum and saying I am full of crap. I really appreciate that. Boy, you sure do want to see all of our projects do well, don't you. Apparently you have zero idea of where we are going. While you are content with shipping binary stuff in your source tree and in your ports tree, we are not. We do not ship binaries. We are not interested in shipping a binary for some CLI. We actually do have the Linux CLI working in emulation, but we will not supply it to our user community. I have cancelled that effort by that developer. We will not supply something to our user community that they cannot fix and improve themselves. We have been talking with Adaptec for 4 months. They have not given us management information. We have been talking to Adaptec for more than a year to get other RAID controller information, as in, how to even get the mailbox stuff fixed. They have not given that to us, either. Noone thought to talk to you. You are, I am sure, under a non-disclosure agreement with Adaptec, and I am sure you would therefore not give us documentation. We are quite used to FreeBSD and Linux people signing NDA's by now. Yesterday on the phone Doug said But we did give OpenBSD documentation, we gave them to Scott Long. Thus, Doug mentioned that *you* had documentation, and thought that was enough. Of course it is not. You do not help us, I told him. That is not how it works. And so it stands -- we still have no documentation. Did I get an offer from you for documentation before you went onto a public site and said I was full of crap? No, I did not. And I expect that now that you have said I am full of crap, we still will get no documentation from you. Right? We are working on a driver-independent raid management framework. One command (perhaps called raidctl(4), we don't know) that should work on any controller from any vendor, which would do management, because the management stuff would be abstracted in a driver-independent way into each driver. Yes this is a difficult project. We have support for AMI almost working. We will support some other product, as well, then we'll see where Adaptec stands. I do a lot of work on OpenBSD. I am sure that you do a lot of work on your stuff in FreeBSD too, so you know what it is to be a very busy busy person. When a vendor ignores me and the efforts of 4 other people trying to get the vendor to listen -- for that long, we have no choice. Yet, you, Scott, you think that you are therefore able to slag us and call us wrong, because YOU are in the loop and we are not? Because you used to WORK at Adaptec, and we did not? That somehow makes us full of crap? I have been watching the mail going to Doug over the last 24 hours. I have been counting controllers mentioned in mails and am now up to over 1,800 Adaptec RAID controllers, with people from very large commercial operations complaining that they have been switching to other controllers (or, having now seen Adaptec's failure in this regard, that they will now actively not buy Adaptec again). Those controllers will not be supported in OpenBSD 3.7 in May. If Adaptec wishes them to be supported in a future release, they had better come and make amends. We are sick of supporting the hardware of vendors who shit on their customers via us. Maybe they can repair this horrid situation enough that we will once again support their controllers by the time OpenBSD 3.8 ships in November. Quite frankly, you don't understand what we are trying to do, and Scott, this is just like the binary only Atheros driver that FreeBSD ships. I like it when all hardware is supported with source code, but just because our methods for getting there are different than yours, Scott, that gives you absolutely no right to go posting such a thing as you did there. Shame on you. Oh boo hoo. You never contacted me. Others in that past have. No, I can't now and never could before give out docs, but I've always been happy to help, review code, point out bugs, etc. Ask the BSD/OS guys, ask the OSDL guys, on and on and on. And as for trying to expose my evil conspriarcy against OpenBSD via Doug, you might want to leave him out of it. If you have questions, ask them and I'll do my best to answer them. Otherwise, stop crying that no one will help you. Scott ___ 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
There has got to be a better way to work with the vendors in order to get the support we need. It just seem to me that the screw you guys, I am going home stuff just does not work. The vendors need a business case in order to do things - they are in business to make money and I can agree with that. Maybe we can do some sort of list of companies or OpenBSD people that use or would use the cards - along with number and install base study of the number of sales they would get and give it to them. We should work on some sort of cookie cutter type setup that tracks the interest and $$ with a product that we can compile and be sent to the vendor in order to get support. The data needs to be correct and true and presented in a business case manor. The one-off flock of emails just do not work. I would be happy to help with this and pursue this if there are others that think it is a good idea. Also is there needs to be a stock form that is send the vendors that covers in detail what we ask for. Some that can be vetted by their lawyer that they would be OK with. We need to work with the vendors in a clear, clean business like manner and leave emotion and philosophy out of it. This is just my 2 cents. If you do not like it, oh well. Regards, Sean Hafeez Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is the utility of the final product. - Lectures On The Electrical Properties Of Materials, L. Solymar, D. Walsh On Mar 19, 2005, at 11:27 AM, Theo de Raadt wrote: re: http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10032offset=15rows=28 See a posting from Scott Long of FreeBSD; --- Thanks for going to a public forum and saying I am full of crap. I really appreciate that. Boy, you sure do want to see all of our projects do well, don't you. Apparently you have zero idea of where we are going. While you are content with shipping binary stuff in your source tree and in your ports tree, we are not. We do not ship binaries. We are not interested in shipping a binary for some CLI. We actually do have the Linux CLI working in emulation, but we will not supply it to our user community. I have cancelled that effort by that developer. We will not supply something to our user community that they cannot fix and improve themselves. We have been talking with Adaptec for 4 months. They have not given us management information. We have been talking to Adaptec for more than a year to get other RAID controller information, as in, how to even get the mailbox stuff fixed. They have not given that to us, either. Noone thought to talk to you. You are, I am sure, under a non-disclosure agreement with Adaptec, and I am sure you would therefore not give us documentation. We are quite used to FreeBSD and Linux people signing NDA's by now. Yesterday on the phone Doug said But we did give OpenBSD documentation, we gave them to Scott Long. Thus, Doug mentioned that *you* had documentation, and thought that was enough. Of course it is not. You do not help us, I told him. That is not how it works. And so it stands -- we still have no documentation. Did I get an offer from you for documentation before you went onto a public site and said I was full of crap? No, I did not. And I expect that now that you have said I am full of crap, we still will get no documentation from you. Right? We are working on a driver-independent raid management framework. One command (perhaps called raidctl(4), we don't know) that should work on any controller from any vendor, which would do management, because the management stuff would be abstracted in a driver-independent way into each driver. Yes this is a difficult project. We have support for AMI almost working. We will support some other product, as well, then we'll see where Adaptec stands. I do a lot of work on OpenBSD. I am sure that you do a lot of work on your stuff in FreeBSD too, so you know what it is to be a very busy busy person. When a vendor ignores me and the efforts of 4 other people trying to get the vendor to listen -- for that long, we have no choice. Yet, you, Scott, you think that you are therefore able to slag us and call us wrong, because YOU are in the loop and we are not? Because you used to WORK at Adaptec, and we did not? That somehow makes us full of crap? I have been watching the mail going to Doug over the last 24 hours. I have been counting controllers mentioned in mails and am now up to over 1,800 Adaptec RAID controllers, with people from very large commercial operations complaining that they have been switching to other controllers (or, having now seen Adaptec's failure in this regard, that they will now actively not buy Adaptec again). Those controllers will not be supported in OpenBSD 3.7 in May. If Adaptec wishes them to be supported in a future release, they had better come and make amends. We are sick of supporting the hardware of vendors who shit on their customers
Re: aac support
On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 12:38:48 -0700, Scott Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Otherwise, stop crying that no one will help you. Please enlighten us (those who buy Adaptec hardware and would like full functionality on OpenBSD) why no one at Adaptec will help the OpenBSD developers by simply giving them the needed documentation? Just what the, pardon the expression, fuck is so special about the RAID functionality on these boards? Doug doesn't seem interested in answering that question so I'm following your advice and asking you. aaron.glenn ___ 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: aac support
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Bob Beck Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2005 1:44 PM To: Bram Van Dam Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: 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. Bob, Your missing something. One of the big reasons the companies want to have NDA's and binary-only drivers is because they know that a binary driver may break with future versions of the OS. So eventually the new version of FreeBSD will have some internal change that breaks AAC support, and the developer that had the NDA for AAC support won't be around any longer, and that card will then become worthless. And so then the userbase has to go buy a new card. And the cycle repeats all over again. How many people have basements full of boxes of perfectly good hardware peripherals that work just a good as the brand new peripherals, but they can't use because the manufacturer didn't release drivers for the new OSes? Ted ___ 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
On Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 12:38:48PM -0700, Scott Long wrote: Oh boo hoo. You never contacted me. Others in that past have. No, I can't now and never could before give out docs, but I've always been happy to help, review code, point out bugs, etc. Ask the BSD/OS guys, ask the OSDL guys, on and on and on. And as for trying to expose my evil conspriarcy against OpenBSD via Doug, you might want to leave him out of it. If you have questions, ask them and I'll do my best to answer them. Otherwise, stop crying that no one will help you. Information is power. You control that information. You signed an NDA, and Adaptec gave you the documentation. Stuff you can't share. Why can't you share it ? Because you signed the NDA. But that's not the point. I'm sure you love it that people have to come to you, and that you can play at being the old (senile?) wise guy on the mountain who will educate the young coder, and show him the error of his ways `no, young one, you see (whack on the head), that's not how you write code for this card.' And so it goes. So, you're quite happy in the current situation, because you think you have relevance. Apart from that, you might be someone quite nice. I don't know, I don't care. I don't see why you should wield that kind of power over me. I don't see why I should have to trust you if you say `this code is good'. Heck, I don't even know you. Which is a very good reason for me to want OpenBSD to have the actual documentation. See, Theo is definitely not the nicest person in the world. But I know him. And I trust him, and my fellow OpenBSD developers, to write correct code from the documentation. NDA crap ? yeah right. It makes practical sense. I see enough economical practical CRAP sense at work. I don't want it to invade the world of Truely Free Software. I hate NDIS, I hate nvidia binary drivers. I hate NDA. They're a really bad compromise, as most users WON'T CARE, and so the vendors can go on writing crappy binary drivers and pushing Windows. ___ 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
Theo has already talked with enough people to get the number of over 1,800 adaptec aac raid controllers being currently used by openbsd users. He has emailed this to Doug, Adaptec's contract for opening docs, and still nothing. It appears that Adaptec isn't interested in repeat business for probably over 2,000 cards in total, not just raid cards. Sad that even stating how much money they will be losing (or making) doesn't get them to change their stance. Jason On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 12:02:29 -0800, Sean Hafeez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There has got to be a better way to work with the vendors in order to get the support we need. It just seem to me that the screw you guys, I am going home stuff just does not work. The vendors need a business case in order to do things - they are in business to make money and I can agree with that. Maybe we can do some sort of list of companies or OpenBSD people that use or would use the cards - along with number and install base study of the number of sales they would get and give it to them. We should work on some sort of cookie cutter type setup that tracks the interest and $$ with a product that we can compile and be sent to the vendor in order to get support. The data needs to be correct and true and presented in a business case manor. The one-off flock of emails just do not work. I would be happy to help with this and pursue this if there are others that think it is a good idea. Also is there needs to be a stock form that is send the vendors that covers in detail what we ask for. Some that can be vetted by their lawyer that they would be OK with. We need to work with the vendors in a clear, clean business like manner and leave emotion and philosophy out of it. This is just my 2 cents. If you do not like it, oh well. Regards, Sean Hafeez Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is the utility of the final product. - Lectures On The Electrical Properties Of Materials, L. Solymar, D. Walsh On Mar 19, 2005, at 11:27 AM, Theo de Raadt wrote: re: http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10032offset=15rows=28 See a posting from Scott Long of FreeBSD; --- Thanks for going to a public forum and saying I am full of crap. I really appreciate that. Boy, you sure do want to see all of our projects do well, don't you. Apparently you have zero idea of where we are going. While you are content with shipping binary stuff in your source tree and in your ports tree, we are not. We do not ship binaries. We are not interested in shipping a binary for some CLI. We actually do have the Linux CLI working in emulation, but we will not supply it to our user community. I have cancelled that effort by that developer. We will not supply something to our user community that they cannot fix and improve themselves. We have been talking with Adaptec for 4 months. They have not given us management information. We have been talking to Adaptec for more than a year to get other RAID controller information, as in, how to even get the mailbox stuff fixed. They have not given that to us, either. Noone thought to talk to you. You are, I am sure, under a non-disclosure agreement with Adaptec, and I am sure you would therefore not give us documentation. We are quite used to FreeBSD and Linux people signing NDA's by now. Yesterday on the phone Doug said But we did give OpenBSD documentation, we gave them to Scott Long. Thus, Doug mentioned that *you* had documentation, and thought that was enough. Of course it is not. You do not help us, I told him. That is not how it works. And so it stands -- we still have no documentation. Did I get an offer from you for documentation before you went onto a public site and said I was full of crap? No, I did not. And I expect that now that you have said I am full of crap, we still will get no documentation from you. Right? We are working on a driver-independent raid management framework. One command (perhaps called raidctl(4), we don't know) that should work on any controller from any vendor, which would do management, because the management stuff would be abstracted in a driver-independent way into each driver. Yes this is a difficult project. We have support for AMI almost working. We will support some other product, as well, then we'll see where Adaptec stands. I do a lot of work on OpenBSD. I am sure that you do a lot of work on your stuff in FreeBSD too, so you know what it is to be a very busy busy person. When a vendor ignores me and the efforts of 4 other people trying to get the vendor to listen -- for that long, we have no choice. Yet, you, Scott, you think that you are therefore able to slag us and call us wrong, because YOU are in the loop and we are not? Because you used to WORK at Adaptec,
Re: aac support
There has got to be a better way to work with the vendors in order to get the support we need. It just seem to me that the screw you guys, I am going home stuff just does not work. Well, there is. We do it all the time! We mail a vendor, and then we start a frank dialogue. I (or some other developer, maybe even Bill Paul from FreeBSD (Mr. Ethernet)... anyways, people like that.. ) explain the business case to the vendor. They almost always understand, and then give us documentation. Sometimes they open the documentation wide up! Sometimes they are willing to give us documentation as long as we do not distribute it too far, and we are willing to do that. We normally share it with, say, 3-4 developers, to ensure that the job gets done and that there someone can fix it later. This also ensures that the documentation stays around in someone's hands even if the company goes away (like Adaptec might after the FTC gets finished with them?) I spend a LOT of time explaining the business case. When vendors do not work with us, they are the odd vendors. Normally they are companies with strong USA stock profiles. I don't know if that has something to do with it, but I suspect it does. And normally they are ones that people, down underground, know produce crap. This also ties into how sometimes it is very hard for us to support their hardware. But, and I must emphasize this, 90% of companies *do* come around. The vendors need a business case in order to do things - they are in business to make money and I can agree with that. Maybe we can do some sort of list of companies or OpenBSD people that use or would use the cards - along with number and install base study of the number of sales they would get and give it to them. We should work on some sort of cookie cutter type setup that tracks the interest and $$ with a product that we can compile and be sent to the vendor in order to get support. The data needs to be correct and true and presented in a business case manor. The one-off flock of emails just do not work. I would be happy to help with this and pursue this if there are others that think it is a good idea. I have thought about doing this, but it is a lot of work. I think we all know what needs to be done to make this accurate. It is a very big job and it needs one passionate person to run it from start to end. It cannot at this time be me, sorry. Also is there needs to be a stock form that is send the vendors that covers in detail what we ask for. I do not think so. I write each mail to the vendors individually, taking the situation and the market into account. I research the market at the stock level, and I ask people in various parts of the world to help me form a profile of what chips are showing up there. If not done carefully, they will be right to take me for a crank. Some that can be vetted by their lawyer that they would be OK with. When the lawyers get involved, that is when the companies make bad decisions and lose. OpenBSD 3.7 will ship with aac off. Adaptec just lost. No matter how they sell it within their own ranks, they just lost. Unless they have something to hide, like crap cards with hundreds of unrepearable bugs and a history of selling crap to customers after knowing that their product was not meeting the promises they make. But what do I know for sure. I do however believe they are balancing two choices of reality. We need to work with the vendors in a clear, clean business like manner and leave emotion and philosophy out of it. I do. It is hard. I do it every day. Last week we got Ralink documentation. I am working on Realtek for their 802.11g docs now. And in a few days, if Realtek keeps stalling me, you will hear from me as to where to send your mails. And then we can get further at supporting a chipset. One way or another, at some point we must get *ahead* of Microsoft at supporting new hardware products on the market. (Show this previous line to your Linux friends) ___ 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
On Saturday, March 19, Sean Hafeez wrote: There has got to be a better way to work with the vendors in order to get the support we need. It just seem to me that the screw you guys, I am going home stuff just does not work. Other approaches have been tried. Extensively, and for a long time. If you know of an approach that works, please demonstrate. At this point, I believe that the community would welcome someone that is going to step up, and have adaptec supply the documentation because they negotiated it out of them. Words here are cheap... but at the current time, they are the only thing we really have left. The voice of the community. The vendors need a business case in order to do things - they are in business to make money and I can agree with that. They have a business case. More than one. 1800+ cards is not a business case? The points I brought up are not a business case? The bad press and such are not a business case? Give me a break. --Toby. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
