From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jul 13 15:23:37 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id PAA29832 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 13 Jul 1995 15:23:37 -0700 Received: from hutcs.cs.hut.fi (root@hutcs.cs.hut.fi [130.233.192.2]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with SMTP id PAA29824 for ; Thu, 13 Jul 1995 15:23:33 -0700 Received: from shadows.cs.hut.fi by hutcs.cs.hut.fi with SMTP id AA15218 (5.65c8/HUTCS-S 1.4 for ); Fri, 14 Jul 1995 01:23:29 +0300 Received: (hsu@localhost) by shadows.cs.hut.fi (8.6.10/8.6.10) id BAA18336; Fri, 14 Jul 1995 01:23:29 +0300 Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 01:23:29 +0300 Message-Id: <199507132223.BAA18336@shadows.cs.hut.fi> From: Heikki Suonsivu To: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com In-Reply-To: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu's message of 12 Jul 1995 17:07:57 +0300 Subject: ISPs and other commercial interests, please read! [was Re: T1] Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Otaniemi, Finland Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk There's the Cronyx/Sigma sync ppp card, but I'm not sure what its top end speed is.. I don't believe that we have anything currently capable of doing T1 right out of a FreeBSD box. Its <= 256kbps, if I correctly understood the documentation. That said, I have 2 ARNET SYNC/570i cards here - one two port and one four port - and they'll do up to 5Mb/sec. All I'm lacking is a driver! The main chip that needs to be dealt with here appears to be the Hitachi HD64570, so if anyone out there has prior programming experience with this then I'm definitely interested in hearing from you! There is a driver written for NetBSD 0.8 (?) for SDL communications' board, which is based on the HD64570. It would need work. I have the data books for the chip, but haven't had time to look at the driver. ARNET has graciously loaned me these boards for the express purpose of pressing them into some skilled programmer's hands, but such hands have proven to be a little harder to find than I had hoped.. :-( I know three people who already said that they might be interested. I'd therefore like to put the following proposal to the various ISPs and others with an interest in mid-speed comms out there who might be reading this message: I have already promised (two weeks ago) 2000 FIM, about $450 donation for free (available under both Berkeley style license and GPL), portably written, clean and documented driver. I require NetBSD compatibility and stronly hope it will written with some thought about Mach port in mind. I can arrange hardware if it isn't available (sorry, no cisco to test it with, just FreeBSD). I could probably give more in hardware or in form of an Internet connection in Espoo or Helsinki in Finland (I require the link to run the arnet hardware in this case :). I know $450 is not much, but I'm not able to pay the work alone. Maybe it is a start, anyway. There may be other projects I might be willing to donate, like a better news server. With that in mind, it begins to make more sense that the various FreeBSD users, both commercial and non, should want to band together more closely and without regard for of any kind of external competition. I have been thinking about fund which would take money earmarked for a specific software project and give it to authors who release the software which fullfills the given requirements. I have several things in mind which I would need but can't afford to pay the development alone. I guess this a bit similar. If you couple this with the fact that the FreeBSD Project itself has no real resources of its own, except perhaps for a common code base and a couple of machines with sources on them, then it quickly becomes clear that to really increase the quality and coverage of FreeBSD's feature set in the same period of time that a commercial OS vendor would (if not faster) then something more has to happen. I'm pretty certain that this would be much more successfull if it wasn't a FreeBSD specific thing. I'm not willing to support driver development if it is done for FreeBSD only, not even for NetBSD. Some project members may elect to donate equipment, funds for purchasing such equipment (or paying an external engineer) or a full or part-time engineer themselves. It would be the job of the project coordinator (either inside or outside the project) to match donations with the needs of the task and see that it reaches completion in a reasonable period of time. Better way to guarantee it is finished in a reasonable period of time is not to pay (at least lot of it) before the work is finished. This won't work with large projects, but they will have to do intermediate releases anyway. -- Heikki Suonsivu, T{ysikuu 10 C 83/02210 Espoo/FINLAND, hsu@cs.hut.fi home +358-0-8031121 work -4513377 fax -4555276 riippu SN