From: crh@regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Christian Huebner) Subject: Re: Why not include patches for Diamond Stealth in kernel? Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1993 07:05:44 GMT
ellis@nova.gmi.edu (Stew Ellis) writes:
>badger@phylo.life.uiuc.edu (Jonathan Badger) writes:
[Material deleted, concerning the inclusion of Stealth patches in the kernel.]
>I am against this. I believe it is alright for Diamond owners to exchange
>information that helps bail each other out of having made a bad decision,
>perhaps before they heard about the problems with XFree86. I think to
>include the patches in the Linux or 386bsd kernel's or as part of the
>official configuration options would serve to encourage the ill-conceived
>proprietary behavior of Diamond and reduce the incentive of people to
>protest to Diamond and its dealers.
I don't really want to flame You, but don't You consider it quite unfair to
make jokes about people, who haven't been as lucky as You, concerning the
selection of their hardware? I guess You as a professor have enough money to
replace hardware, which isn't supported by Your software. Still there are
many students out there, who simply can't afford that. Oh, and here's one
more point: When I bought my Stealth one year ago I a) couldn't know that
diamond would alter it's policy that radically (the old Speedstar WAS good)
and b)it was the only available S3-card anyway.
>It is kind of incongruous to think about running a free OS on proprietary
>hardware, no matter how cheap that hardware is. The growth of free UNIXes
>depends on the growth of free programming interfaces such as NFS, RPC,
>POSIX, the graphics chips (including accelerators) with published APIs, free
>X (Xlib, Xt, Xaw, Xview, OLIT).
I aggree with You, but is that a reason to punish thousands of users?
>If people want to encourage proprietary efforts and ultimately higher prices
>then patronize proprietary UNIX and X vendors, but do not constantly clutter
>up Usenet News with your requests to compromise the integrity of the great
>efforts of people like Linus, the binary distribution developers, the
>hundreds of people developing and porting packages of free source, and
>particularly the Xfree team.
You should know that trying to get support for Your hardware does not mean
supporting the companies in question. What should I do with my Stealth? Throw
it away? And talking about cluttering the net: What do You do, raving about
people, who mostly didn't know what they were getting in to? After all Diamond
was a company of good reputation once.
Christian Huebner crh@regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de