Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 19:18:51 -0400 From: dennis@et.htp.com (dennis) To: Heikki Suonsivu <hsu@cs.hut.fi> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Support charges ( was Re: SUP target for -STABLE...) Message-ID: <199507232318.TAA06632@mail.htp.com>
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Heikki Suonsivu writes...... > helping to create a competitor. As a commercial vendor its the only way to > do things. > >Cyclades does quite well with their serial boards, and they have all >information and drivers wide open. To my knowledge there are other wendors >offering products based on the same chip cyclades uses. > >When I was selecting the hardware to go in our terminal servers, I didn't >check out the ads. I only checked out the source code to see if it was >available and running. > >Of course, I'm not saying that you should change your policy, just that you >might be making a mistake. But probably you can do quite well without my >money, anyway :-) First of all you're only talking about a board driver, not a protocol suite. There's nothing proprietary about board drivers, and generally anyone with the right information can write one. There's only a handful of frame relay implementations in the world (even less good ones), and it takes very expensive, experienced people with expensive equipment to write them. For a company to spend time and money on the development process, and then hand over the resulting technology to our competitors (who can then port the product without the same costs) is not feasable. We also charge more for our products because of our technological advantage.....if others have the same technology then we have to lower our prices to compete with our own technology. We've considered releasing source to our board drivers (without X.25, FR, or Sync PPP) and selling a bare board with no software support. We just can't believe that any serious business is going to use public domain software over a tested, supported commercial product to save a couple hundred dollars. When you're paying a couple hundred bucks a month for a line you don't want to take a chance. dennis
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