Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 00:34:12 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Doug Hass" <dhass@imagestream.com> 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: <000301c15614$f30c78a0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1011015083441.10426E-100000@ims1.imagestream.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Doug Hass [mailto:dhass@imagestream.com] >Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 6:53 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: Jim Bryant; MurrayTaylor; freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG; >freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG; Alfred Shippen >Subject: RE: FYI > Hi Doug, I'm going to address myself to these points openly as there's some points here which we all need to be familiar with. > >We are bound by third party agreements and are not allowed to release any >more free code (legally) than we already have. If we were not restricted >by SBS, Trillium, and Rockwell (among others), we would release all of the >code under GPL or lGPL. These agreements do NOT prevent us from working >with developers to support other platforms, though. It only prevents the >free release of portions of the code. > You said in a mail to Leo, the following: "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." I'm going to assume that the programming specs you refer to here are what is being licensed from SBS, Trillium, and Rockwell, because either Rockwell or Trillium is the actual manufacturer of the sync chip. I'll assume that SBS is just making the support chips on the board and the interface chips to the PCI bus. Now, let me discuss for a moment how the current Imagestream WAN drivers operate. (based on my reading of the public code, which of course may be incorrect) Please feel free to interject where you feel I'm full of crap. :-) The "hardware API" or the actual register interface code, is a binary-only module that is "snapped in" to SAND. SAND is GPL and is similar to the FreeBSD Netgraph module - it provides all the higher-level protocol stuff, like Frame Relay, PPP, HDLC, and such. SAND goes between the OS TCP/IP stack and that binary only module. Imagestream has no problem releasing SAND for public consumption basically because all that PPP/HDLC/Frame and other datalink code is already available, PPP code has been available for time out of mind from many places, (including BSD) long before Imagestream ever wrote SAND, and Cisco HDLC was reverse-engineered some time ago (Besides that, Cisco gave up trying to hide their HDLC interface once Wellfleet/Bay Networks died) Obviously, Imagestream had to do some work, but I'd say a lot of it was in the area of supporting these binary snap in modules. The reason that Imagestream went this road is that like Doug said, all those hardware vendors like Rockwell think that there's something valuable in a pure register interface spec publication for their products. So, this way Imagestream can sign their souls away to get access to that interface spec - but they isolate all that contaminated code in this binary snap-in module. It's a hack of a solution but unfortunately is getting more and more common under UNIX because the Linux people have caved in and are busily screwing their own principles of GPL, by soliciting ever greater amounts of closed-source, Linux code. Imagestream isn't the only one out there doing this. Now, you can make all the technical arguments you want about how a modularized development environment like this allows code reuse and this is quite true - but you must keep in mind that SAND's modularized development has a primary goal of being able to keep the contaminated code in the driver snap-in modules, code reuse is secondary. There's other modularized driver development models in which EVERYTHING is publically available including the modules. >That being said, we're always interested in supporting a wide variety of >platforms. Without the SAND architecture, though, there really is little >hope of having FreeBSD support for the WANic 520 series cards (or other >cards, for that matter). This is correct and incorrect. It's correct because what Imagestream wants to have to be able to easily graft in FreeBSD to their supported UNIX os's is SAND - if done right then the actual driver module itself would have trivial changes whether used on FreeBSD or Linux, so you don't have to do much other than keep SAND maintained in FreeBSD. It's incorrect because it's perfectly possible to write a monolithic driver under FreeBSD that's only available as an object module and instead links in to the FreeBSD answer to SAND - which is Netgraph. This is exactly how the WANic 400 driver is now. (except of course the WANic 4xx driver is source available) Of course, this object module will have to be recompiled for every new version of FreeBSD, because it has to either be mod-loaded into the kernel or statically compiled into it. It's a rather icky proposition for a company like Imagestream to contemplate from a support perspective. But it certainly is NOT impossible. >If there are developers in the community >interested in porting SAND and the various hardware modules (for the 520 >series and other cards) to FreeBSD, we'll be happy to work with them and >support that effort. It is in ALL of our interests to have the widest >support for standards-based technologies as possible. > But you see that in this area SAND is no more standard than Netgraph is. SAND provides Linux users that run WANic cards a lot of stuff - but it is GPL which makes it difficult to use in many commercial FreeBSD projects. It's been discussed to death in this forum before but the worst possible thing that Imagestream could have done was to put SAND under GPL. If you had simply put it under BSD license then BOTH the BSD and Linux people could have used it, in fact Netgraph may have never been written, and a lot of other commercial UNIX's might have used it too (like Apple's MacOS X) >> No offense, but once Imagestream stopped selling WANic400's you >> ceased being an entity of interest to FreeBSD, as you no longer sell >> any products that run under it. > >I'll reiterate what I've said to you privately: ImageStream DID NOT make >the decision to discontinue the 400 series or the RISCom/N2 series. This >decision rested solely with SBS. > I believe you, I believe you. But, did the decision makers at SBS even know that the BSD community currently can't use the 500 series and above? And that discontinuting it would cut out that section of their market? Did you guys know that? >However, FreeBSD users are NOT without options: > >1) FreeBSD users can still get the WANic 400 and RISCom cards from the >second hand market, as another person mentioned. > Doug, in this last year alone I've bought about $20K worth of miscellaneous networking crap off Ebay for resale to our customers and other purposes. (keep in mind I hold the technical reins to an ISP and we will do what it takes to get a customer connected to us - and a lot of times that involves getting them a cheap router off Ebay because they cannot afford anything more than a $200 router. And you would have nightmares if you saw what kind of router that $200 fetches. :-)) I've had enough experience with the used networking market to say what I'm going to say here. During that time I've seen WANic or RISCom cards come up for bid exactly SIX times. And, THREE of the times I was the sole bidder and bought them. The other three times, well one was a 56K card, another the seller wanted $500 (hah) and the other the seller wanted another rediculous amount. During that time I've also kept tabs on what the commercial networking resale vendors that I also buy from have been doing and I've not seen anything at all marked RISCom, WANic, or Imagestream. I hope very much that the dump of cards on the market in September will eventually percolate down. But I don't believe that the second's market will be a significant source of WANic 400's anytime soon if ever, and here is why: 1) The cards are almost impossible to identify if they are just loose with no documentation. Some vendors slap their moniker in unmistakable letters across all their cards, SDL/SBS and you guys never did. Understand that the level of people that break up old PC's and sell them for scrap is barely above that of your average parts-puller in any auto wrecking yard. What they can't understand or identify they break while going after what they can identify. I very much doubt that an old WANic or RISCom card will make it through these people if it's inside an old PC that's scrapped out. They will probably toss it in the garbage along with that "weird cable with that screwy rectangular connector on it" 2) The price drop going from the closeout auction sale to the actual market cost is too great for most dealers to take. What I mean by this is that right now, someone is sitting on a stack of 1000 WANic cards that they spend $100K for, with stars in their eyes thinking of how they can make a half million dollars by selling them on the second's market for $500 apiece. What they don't understand is that the best sale price they might get for a closed-out WANic 405 now (since the vendor is no longer making the card) is about $20, $30 if they include a cable. Unless SBS closed out that 1000 cards for $10K, and included boxes and manuals with every card, whatever dealer or company that bought them is going to get totally screwed if they attempt to unload them on the used market. It's going to take that company several years to understand this, and by the time they are willing to write off the $10K, nobody is going to know what the cards are anymore and they will probably be pitched in the trash. 3) In my opinion, about 30% of computer and networking hardware is scrapped because it's broken. That leaves 70% of scrapped gear re-usable. My gut feeling is that the second's market sees about 30% of this. This means that the majority of scrapped WANic 4xx cards will never get near the seconds market, they are going to be pperfectly good, operating cards that are going to go straight to the landfill. Simply due to the percentages, while 1000 cards dumped on the seconds market SEEMS a lot, it's a drop in the bucket of the total amount of computer and networking gear that shows up in the second's market. The seconds market is great when it comes to handling computer gear that was once widely used and very popular. It's horrible at handling gear that is very, very narrowly targeted. And it's not just computers that are like this, many other second's markets operate the same way. >2) WANic 400 series cards are still available in quantity. If the market >for FreeBSD is as large as you claim, then you or someone else in the >community should have no problem snapping up a quantity of these cards and >reselling them to interested parties. As you know, price determines everything. At $777 per WANic405, you elected NOT to purchase 100 of them from SBS and just warehouse them. (I'll assume that your probably paying at least $500 per card, which is $50K for that quantity of 100) If SBS is going to continue to have that offer of they will sell them to you at lots of 100, why then in your shoes I'd make the same decision, because with SBS dumping 1000 of the cards on the used market, you could be putting $50K into a white elephant. I mean, if you sell 100 WANic cards a year, why then if SBS dumped 1000 of them, that's a 10 year supply floating around out there. Surely, if a few years go by and the dumped WANic 405's don't show up on the seconds market, you could then perhaps assume that someone screwed up and pitched the lot of them into a Dumpster, and it might then be safe to consider investing that $50K into a batch of 100 of them. Now, if SBS is willing to do a lot of 100 cards at a wholesale price of, say $50 dollars a card, then I and a lot of other people could probably round up 100 sales very quickly at $100 per card. But I'll stop there because I know that all this is marketing and the technical people on the mailing list are probably asleep by now. :-) I'll go one step further: If anyone >contacts me about the WANic 400 series, mentions that they are for >FreeBSD, I promise to give an extra 15% discount over and above our normal >volume discounts just to illustrate my desire to support the FreeBSD >community. > This is a kind offer but you have to put some pricing to it. If your only selling them in lots of 100 cards, at the price on your website of $777 per card, that's 15% off a $77K sale. I'd guess that your volume discounts would drop that $77K quite a bit - but still out of reach of an individual company, of course. But this is all academic marketing of course - because at those dollar levels, it's far cheaper to simply pay a developer to write FreeBSD drivers for the WANic 5xx series of cards and deal with the licensing issues. >3) Virtually ALL of our customers, save for OEMs making their own >products, purchase complete routers. Going this route would eliminate the >need to have FreeBSD support, as any user would have a standalone router. > Remember, your talking to a bunch of FreeBSD people here, they might not want a router based on Linux. 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-hackers" in the body of the message
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