Dennis writes:
> I guess the problem with the "free" camps has always been that they
> think that anyone can write a driver and that hardware is hardware
> and a driver is a driver.  You also seem to think that the object is
> just to "make sales", which is rather amatuerish as well. We have no
> interest in supplying general purpose hardware at bargain basement
> products to anyone with a VISA card. We sell a value added,
> full-featured product suitable for production environments.

I understand your position.

On the other hand, here is a more practical way to look at this:

1) It appears that we have a driver for SDL's card (I was unaware of
   this).
2) You probaly have a firm with limited manpower and such.
3) It is thus likely that you can't support every version of NetBSD
   that appears.
4) This may mean that you lose a (limited) number of sales to SDL if
   it turns out that you can't spare manpower to support NetBSD.

Whether this is of concern to you or not, I don't know. I was
personally unaware of any cards other than yours and SDL's anyway, so
I'm not sure you have so much to worry about in the first place -- so
far as I remember, SDL already has drivers on lots of platforms, so I
doubt they'd want yours.

In the end, as a businessman, you have to make money. You've judged
that you'll make more money your way -- I suspect you'd make more
money by being open source, but everyone has their own spin on such
things.

> I think I've learned what I need to from this discussion. Maybe some
> day you'll understand that its beneficial for you to support 3rd
> party vendors, including object only, because it ads capability to
> your OS, rather than harping on the source issue.

I think you totally misunderstand why I stated this in the first
place.

I percieved that you, as a vendor, appeared to have limited resources
to support the card on NetBSD. Naively assuming that you believed
yourself to be a hardware and not a software vendor, I suggested that
by going open source on your driver, you'd be permitting NetBSD to
support itself, thus freeing you of the cost of having to support your 
driver on our platform. I was not trying to suggest that you have no
role as a third party vendor -- I was just trying to save you time and 
money.

If you wish to distribute object only drivers for NetBSD, naturally
I'm not going to say "go to hell" or anything. I just think you're
missing a valuable opportunity to avoid needless expense for
yourself. As a vendor, you have to make the call, of course.

Perry