From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Mar 24 10:20:42 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from feral.com (feral.com [192.67.166.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4E43E37B718; Sat, 24 Mar 2001 10:20:38 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mjacob@feral.com) Received: from beppo (beppo [192.67.166.79]) by feral.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA24876; Sat, 24 Mar 2001 10:20:36 -0800 Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2001 10:20:31 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Jacob Reply-To: mjacob@feral.com To: Luigi Rizzo Cc: Peter Wemm , Mike Smith , scanner@jurai.net, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Intel driver doc's Take 2. In-Reply-To: <200103241731.SAA49447@info.iet.unipi.it> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, Luigi Rizzo wrote: > I have read the thread for a while, and i wonder: > > why in the world someone should go through the effort and > responsibility of SIGNING THE NDA _and_ negotiating with Intel > for getting permissions to redistribute the code ? Because NDAs come as a blanket cover, and you can then negotiate exceptions to them. > > I do not see how this is doing any good to the project, given that > 1) there are alternatives (for 100Mbit quite a few of them), and some > cards are even better and cheaper than the "fxp"; > 2) even if you have hardware with an "fxp" on board, adding a second > supported card is cheap and easy -- nothing like having to put > in a second video card; It's not about 100Mbit. Personally, I prefer the tulip chip. It's about Intel's 10/100/1000 Pro1000T. > > Of course if you need support for this card in your own business, > you do what you need (including NDA's etc), but that is a totally > different story (and it appears to be a relatively straightforward > and quick thing to do if you do not need to redistribute the source > code). > > I think we all have better ways to use our time for FreeBSD than > dealing with the legal department of some company. > Well- sure. some of us are required by various contractual obligations to our clients to attempt to support this stuff, against Intel's resistance I might add. Therefore, we're trying to encourage Intel to do the right thing. And this might also include encouraging the buyback into open source of the chipset because we happen to believe that this is in the mutual best interest of the FreeBSD project and the vendor. -matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message