Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 06:04:32 -0500 (EST) From: Thomas David Rivers <ponds!rivers@dg-rtp.dg.com> To: ponds!etinc.com!dennis, ponds!uriah.heep.sax.de!joerg_wunsch, ponds!haldjas.folklore.ee!narvi Cc: ponds!FreeBSD.ORG!hackers Subject: pay-for support? (was: Re: Does de driver do 100MBIT Full Duplex?) Message-ID: <199704041104.GAA10560@lakes.water.net>
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dennis <dg-rtp!etinc.com!dennis@ponds.water.net> writes: > > At 09:10 AM 4/3/97 -0500, dennis wrote: > >At 10:23 AM 4/3/97 +0300, Narvi wrote: > >> > >> > >>On Wed, 2 Apr 1997, J Wunsch wrote: > >> > >>> As dennis wrote: > >>> > >>> > Is the driver that you send me directly for 2.1.7 (that worked > >>> > beautifully) in 2.2.1R? If not, WHY NOT! > >>> > >>> No need to shout. We aren't deaf exactly. > >>> > >>> Since Matt released it _after_ 2.2 has been cut. I've got a very > >>> explicit message from Matt when i've been asking him earlier (right in > >>> time to get something into 2.2 still) about a new version, that he > >>> considered the stuff that sneaked into NetBSD by that time too buggy > >>> to see it officially in FreeBSD. That's why we've been integrating > >>> the little hack still to make at least the DE21140A supported. We > >>> originally deferred the inclusion of this patch in anticipation of the > >>> new driver version. > > It seems to me, that the fact that the most popular driver for FreeBSD > doesn't work is a sufficient condition to hold up the release until it > does. > > What you have now is a release that was supposed to be a "great > saviour" feature-wise that is fundamentally unusable in its released > form for a large number of users..... > > Dennis > Hmmm... why do you say that's the most popular driver. Out of the all of the machines I can physically touch, only one of them uses that driver. I'd say the most popular driver was the syscons one :-) For my purposes, second to syscons is aha2940, which coincidently, suffers a little as well. This begs a question I've been considering for some time. Just how much would you be willing to pay for a release that was supported on your hardware? Would you accept purchasing the hardware from a vendor that "guaranteed" (in some sense) that FreeBSD worked, and provided FreeBSD updates as necessary? If that's true; what's the limit you'd put on that. Certainly a million dollars (US) is too great; but would you go for, say, a few hundred above what Gateway is selling equivalent hardware? Or, would a better model be the way Red Hat is selling Linux; less that $50 a user; with phone technical support? [I figure, since I live in the same county as Red Hat, and could maybe even steal some of their technical support people :-), I could possibly start up this business...] - Dave Rivers -
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