From owner-freebsd-chat Fri May 17 11:45:10 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id LAA08750 for chat-outgoing; Fri, 17 May 1996 11:45:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from palmer.demon.co.uk (palmer.demon.co.uk [158.152.50.150]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id LAA08714 for ; Fri, 17 May 1996 11:44:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from palmer.demon.co.uk (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by palmer.demon.co.uk (sendmail/PALMER-1) with ESMTP id TAA11850; Fri, 17 May 1996 19:30:21 +0100 (BST) To: Jeremy Sigmon cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG From: "Gary Palmer" Subject: Re: Companies who want NDAs In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 17 May 1996 10:31:16 EDT." Date: Fri, 17 May 1996 19:30:20 +0100 Message-ID: <11848.832357820@palmer.demon.co.uk> Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Jeremy Sigmon wrote in message ID : > > Has anyone complied a list of companies who require NDAs and thus will > not have FreeBSD drivers made for them? >From the top of my head: Buslogic won't release programming details of their latest and greatest card without NDA. (Forgotten the name, sorry). SMC (or at least in the past) didn't want to release the spec for their 100bT EISA card (which had a custom chipset). Xircom (see other discussion) There are others ... perhaps a look through the mail archives (see the search engine on the WWW pages) would be productive too. I think a point to be made here is that a lot more cards COULD have drivers written for them, if (a) a person with the required knowledge had such a card to work with, (b) said person had time and (c) the card was worth his/her time supporting. Perhaps we should support a lot more quirky, unusual cards, but is a driver for an 8bit SCSI I card (no DMA support) worth the hassle? It'd maybe get 2 people use it EVER and would be very slow. Considering the number of people who know how to write device drivers is finite, and they often have quite a lot on their plate already, unless a card is obviously mass market and a lot of people would use such a driver if it existed, it's probably better moving on to other work. Gary -- Gary Palmer FreeBSD Core Team Member FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info