[nycbug-talk] Fwd: Adaptec AAC raid support

[Jesse Callaway]

On Monday 21 March 2005 01:49 pm, G. Rosamond says:
> On Mar 21, 2005, at 1:15 PM, Isaac Levy wrote:
> > Wordup All,
> >
> > On Mar 18, 2005, at 6:56 PM, G. Rosamond wrote:
> >> This is a thread well worth following. . .
> >
> > [snip OpenBSD Adapted RAID saga]
> >
> > For those of you who didn't follow this thread, OpenBSD 3.7 will ship
> > without Adaptec RAID support, as made slashdot yesterday:
> >
> > 
> > 
http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/05/03/20/1944233.shtml?tid=137&tid=198&tid=190&tid=172&tid=7 
 (link was rejoined)
> > 


I also thought, as I kind of elided to in the bar at some point, that one of 
the FreeBSD devs was actually employed by Adaptec and thus had access to 
stuff that the outside world doesn't. This also makes it hairy.

I think the among problems getting the low-level docs out are:

1. They have to filter some of the stuff which might show how patented and 
fully-closed stuff was built.

2. They know that the open source community is awesome at finding bugs. They 
don't want to end up getting negative press. Without people peering into the 
workings of the card (or the interface to the card) a company can carefully 
market only the features. This is bad news for us, but is entirely up to the 
paranoid stockholder to figure out how to deal with in the long run. My 
opinion is that a lot of business will be lost if one continues to be so 
crass when it comes to emailing the damn pdf to the driver developers. Of 
course they are not considering that 3rd parties may even make their WHQL 
compliant (minus the application fee) drivers for free.

ok, this is not really a numbered list anymore, but I don't think it's worth 
reformatting...

The big problem is that it takes a good deal of motivation for someone to get 
the docs out in a way which is friendly to their bosses.

-jesse