Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 01:04:51 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Doug Hass" <dhass@imagestream.com>, "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org> Cc: "Jim Bryant" <kc5vdj@yahoo.com>, "MurrayTaylor" <taylorm@bytecraft.au.com>, <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, "Alfred Shippen" <ashippen@metromatics.com.au> Subject: RE: FYI Message-ID: <000501c15619$3b30a760$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1011015100057.22756B-100000@ims1.imagestream.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Doug Hass [mailto:dhass@imagestream.com] >Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 8:04 AM >To: Leo Bicknell >Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt; Jim Bryant; MurrayTaylor; >freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG; freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG; Alfred >Shippen >Subject: Re: FYI > > >> Would your agreements allow you to provide resources to a small >> number of developers (under NDA and all that of course) to produce >> drivers that you would then release in binary form (eg a kernel >> module) under a free license? > >It sure would. > >> If you cannot release the source code to your drivers, can you >> release hardware programming specifications (again, perhaps under >> NDA) that allowed someone to develop an independant free licensed >> driver? > >Unfortunately, the API to the cards (the driver development kit, hardware >programming specifications or whatever you want to call them) are licensed >from several third parties and we are bound by agreement not to make them >public. The 400 series cards (and, for that matter, the RISCom/N2 series >cards) did not require an API, which is how BSDI and FreeBSD drivers came >about in the first place. > >As I mentioned above, we CAN license the driver code and the DDK for >development. This means that you could produce FreeBSD drivers which we >could then distribute in a binary form under a free end-user license. > Frankly this is the only way I can see that FreeBSD drivers for the 5xx series would ever come about. Porting SAND over, while having advantages of long term support, is just overkill for this, besides which it's unlikely you will get a FreeBSD developer to work on GPL code. This would end up putting a WANic 5xx driver into the same status as the drivers for the Emerging Technologies, or Sangoma sync cards, which both come with binary-only FreeBSD drivers. It would actually have a leg up over those drivers because it would have Netgraph hooks and I believe that the Sangoma drivers don't (but I've never worked with the Sangoma cards so I don't know for certain) If the register interface to the 5xx cards wasn't tremendously different than the 4xx cards then the sr driver would be a good skeleton to start with. While the offer of the DDK is nice, my guess is most of the code in it is for making SAND modules. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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