Re: DragonflyBSD on the desktop (was: Re: Replacing Sendmail with Postfix in the base system)

[Danial Thom <danial_thom@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> 
> :Is there an official binary driver policy for
> DragonFly?  I understand
> :people want the fast GUI and stuff to work,
> but giving in to the crap
> :that companies push on the open source
> community isn't acceptable in
> :my opinion.  Its just going to ultimately
> prolong the problem and
> :diminish the efforts of people trying to get
> companies to open up
> :their drivers.
> :
> :Personally, I would say its good if you don't
> support the likes of nvidia.
> :
> :-Kevin
> 
>     I am not particularly interested in
> supporting binary only drivers
>     considering past experience where the
> vendors have supplied them, but
>     then not bothered to keep them up to date
> or fix bugs or support
>     new versions of the OS.  NVidia has been
> especially anti-social in
>     this regard.  If we want anything that
> 'lasts', it has to be native.

So you're pledging to rigorously support the 45
(or however many there are) ethernet drivers you
inherited from freebsd, plus all new controllers
that come out? Have you fixed all of the bugs in
the bge driver yet? I see you don't support the
intel 82563EB controller on the Woodcrest
compatible MB I was looking at. When can I expect
to see that? Will I have to donate a board to you
to get someone to do/test the driver for it?

I'm being a devil's advocate here, but your
stance is ridiculous, considering that you don't
have the financial resources nor the manpower to
support drivers properly yourself. The truth is
that only a small handful of drivers have ever
been any good in any open source OS; the ones
that the one or two guys with the talent to
support them use themselves. You used to have to
beat David Greenman over the head to add support
for intel's latest fxp part, because he was off
on some other project and he didn't have the
time. 

Not that any vendor is going to bother doing a
driver for DFLY with its pidly user base, but the
argument is just silly. The windows model works;
the trick is getting enough users for the vendors
to care.

DT



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