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Date:      Fri, 17 May 1996 23:05:34 +0000
From:      Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.tfs.com>
To:        salyzyn@inet.dpt.com
Cc:        freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Who wants a DPT SCSI controller driver? 
Message-ID:  <3059.832374334@critter.tfs.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 17 May 1996 14:52:47 MST." <199605172152.OAA16143@orodruin.orthanc.com> 

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> I'm forwarding this on Mark's behalf. If you would like to see FreeBSD
> support for DPT's SCSI controllers, please let him know.

Hi Mark,

You can quote me on this one for your management.

Why would DPT want a FreeBSD driver ?

Well, I can think of two things, market and publicity.

Market:

Probably bigger than you might think.  I have personally in the last 13 
weeks (the age of my on-line mailarchive) told 14 different people "No, 
sorry, as nice as the DPTs look, we don't support them, sorry."  and
I'm generally know considered a HW wizard of any importance.

Publicity: 

A lot of the people out there on the FreeBSD mailing lists do a lot more
than FreeBSD.  A lot of them have quite impressive power when it comes 
to hardware selection.
	"Hey, Danny, what do you think about FOORBAR controllers ?"
	"Don't know, never ran one"
	"Hmm what do you use then ?"
	"FROBOZZ.  Never had a hitch"
Notice, nothing bad was said about FOORBAR, but somebody else came out
on top, because they had been burned in.

A lot of people use the stuff on the FreeBSD lists as guidelines when 
they buy PCs for other uses.  Often I hear people argument something 
along this line: "If FreeBSD can find HW problems where Windows 3.1
see none, and I select HW that work well with FreeBSD, is should have
less trouble with my Windows."

DPT is obviously seldom mentioned, and if it is it's the "sorry, but 
don't!" message you see.

It would be a lot better for you to have the message be: "Works great."


If you produce a driver that works well, with the price/performance and
market-share DPT posess, I would expect that you will soon see the
business case for writing the driver provide you with a healty return
on the quite modest investment it would be.

Poul-Henning Kamp,
Speaking for himself, not for the FreeBSD core-team.

PS:
Send us an email on the core-team (core@freebsd.org) and let us find
some way we can get the best out of this.  We will probably be more
than happy to distribute a binary version of the driver in our releases,
if we can agree on the details.

PPS:
I personally have two DPT controllers at home, but one is living a boring
life in a little used Windows machine and the other is simply lying unused
on a shelf.  Much to my irritation because I have a disk that would benefit
from a decent controller...

--
Poul-Henning Kamp           | phk@FreeBSD.ORG       FreeBSD Core-team.
http://www.freebsd.org/~phk | phk@login.dknet.dk    Private mailbox.
whois: [PHK]                | phk@ref.tfs.com       TRW Financial Systems, Inc.
Future will arrive by its own means, progress not so.



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