Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 12:38:10 -0700 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, Jerry Hicks <wghicks@bellsouth.net>, FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: RMS on UDI Message-ID: <199810061938.MAA00782@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 06 Oct 1998 13:15:00 MDT." <361A6C34.4AD93BAE@softweyr.com>
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> > I share Brett's (and RMS' -- imagine THEM agreeing on something!) > reservations about Intel's motivation in this. I think most contributors > to the free software community feel that commercial organizations should > not benefit from free software unless they give something back. If, > however, this encourages Intel or any other hardware company to be more > open with specifications and other documentation required to write drivers, > they WILL be giving something back. If Intel undertakes to develope UDI > drivers for the various hardware products they produce, this will benefit > FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, SCO, Sun, and anyone else who uses UDI > drivers. Actually, Intel approached the UDI folks and said "we think that UDI on Linux would be a good thing", and offered the resources to do the development work. This is definitely giving up front. The other UDI partners were quietly developing UDI for their own mutual benefit before this; they were attempting to make life easier for vendors of hardware for their environments (eg. Adaptec, Interphase, &c.) to do driver development. Their goal was never to attempt to seduce the free software community, just to reduce their own costs by sharing technology in an admirably bullshit-free fashion. > It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft tries to horn in on this and sway > the UDI spec into agreeing with NT as well. There's somebody to be leery > of, brothers and sisters. I haven't heard anything about this yet. I suspect the UDI camp would be playing it fairly quiet. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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