Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 10:01:34 -0600 (CST) From: Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> To: Dennis <dennis@etinc.com> Cc: "Chistopher S. Weimann" <cweimann@wallnet.com>, "Andresen,Jason R." <jandrese@mitre.org>, <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: if_fxp - the real point Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.32.0103290932450.30163-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us> In-Reply-To: <5.0.0.25.0.20010328165848.03e9bcd0@mail.etinc.com>
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On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Dennis wrote: > At 04:22 PM 03/28/2001, Chistopher S. Weimann wrote: > >On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 12:33:21PM -0500, Dennis wrote: > > > > > > Your logic is backwards. You think that rewarding mediocre companies will > > > scare good companies into wanting a piece of the pie. The only thing that > > > it will do is consume these companies so that the good companies can > > have a > > > larger share of the more profitable sun/NT market, and convince them that > > > they want no part of the "free" market if they have to compete with > > > cut-rate hardware from hungry companies. > > > > > > >Ok, let me get this Free Market thing straight. > > > >Not buying from a good company that provides a useful product > >and instead buying from a bad company that doesn't provide a > >useful product will make things better. > > > >That seems to be what you are saying dennis. > > > No, I said just the opposite. This was in response to someone > suggesting that we boycott companies like Intel for not providing > full disclosure on their boards, and reward companies that do by > touting their products. > > So I said that promoting lesser products because they are > "cooperative" will make good hardware less available to the > freebsd community, which might make some little people feel > powerful but it wont serve the user base, which I assume is the > goal. You seem to keep inferring that all vendors who disclose full programming information somehow have "lesser" hardware. Sure, there is plenty of crap out there that happens to have full programming information for it. There is also lots of good stuff that has full programming information. The Alteon Tigon and Tigon 2 are perfect examples (and very relevant to this discussion, since it seems to have started over the Intel Gigabit Ethernet adapters), and Alteon seems to have disclosed more than enough information to allow Bill Paul to write an extremely good driver. They actually went so far as to release the _firmware_ code for the board (how many vendors do you know of who do THAT?) so that Bill could tweak it as he saw fit, rather than having to use "black-box" firmware like most other vendors supply. This, to me, actually makes the Alteon Tigon Gigabit Ethernet chipsets a far, far BETTER product than the Intel Gigabit Ethernet chipsets. Intel in this case is the "lesser" hardware vendor which also happens to be a pain in the ass when it comes to getting programming information. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For IA32 and Alpha architectures. IA64, PPC, and ARM under development. http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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