From: n217cg@tamuts.tamu.edu (Scott Taylor) Subject: Re: Why not include patches for Diamond Stealth in kernel? Date: 8 Feb 1993 03:39:53 GMT
In article <1l3llmINN5df@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> jfc@athena.mit.edu (John F Carr) writes:
> ......a lot of stuff deleted......
>The Diamond Stealth is only the tip of the iceberg. Where are the calls for
>a boycott of SCSI adapters which don't make programming information freely
>available (Ultrastor support is in the SCSI kit)? Will you require that
Umm, I hate to nitpick, but bad example. UltraStor was very helpful when I
requested programming information from them, and were very prompt in sending
me their documentation.
>Adaptec release ROM listings so users can write their own microcode?
Isn't this taking it a little far? Microcode doesn't really count as an API.
In any case, I don't think that anybody wants companies like Diamond to hand out
free copies of all the trade secrets that make their products faster/better/more
powerful, they just want access to the programming information necessary to
make use of them. It doesn't make much sense for a hardware vendor to shackle
its customers to 8-bit ROM BIOS code and DOS in today's market of commodity
32-bit processing and OSes that run directly on top of the hardware.
Scott Taylor
n217cg@tamuts.tamu.edu