Late in the thread, I know...

On Mon, Oct 26, 1998 at 08:27:12PM -0500, Dennis wrote:
> At 07:46 PM 10/26/98 -0500, you wrote:
> >[ On Mon, October 26, 1998 at 18:42:05 (-0500), Dennis wrote: ]
> >> Subject: Re: T3/T1 cards - interest 
> >>
> >> Its also likely someone would port them to cheaper cards. 

Dennis, could you please answer (as straightforwardly as possible)
the question which has been posed a number of times: Are you a 
software company? Hardware company? 'Solution' company?

Here's my take: You say you don't make money on hardware, since you
don't sell in volume like Adaptec, 3com etc... If this is the case,
why do you sell the cards at all, and not just the software (FR,
and BM)?

I see two possibilities, you sell the cards to facilitate people
using your software, to provide them with a single source solution.
Or, your software would not work as well on other cards, because it
takes some special advantage of the hardware design.

In the first case, you could specify an API for US to meet, and allow
any driver to use your BM+FR software with any hardware driver (see
Herb's comment re: ATM). If you really don't make money on cards, this
could allow you to sell a lot more software. NetBSD (and other freeware)
developers could make sure our drivers could provide the functions your
software needs in order to function.

In the second case, you could still do the above, but remind people
that they will get the best performance out of using one of your
cards. 

Either of these would allow ongoing use of your software with any
future version of NetBSD, without your having to do major work.

> 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.

Not at all. If you look back in the archives, you'll see many discussions
such as "which xxxx card should I buy?", answered both in terms of hardware
design, (i.e. 3C509), and driver quality (i.e. NCR SCSI). There are 
elements important to quality on both sides (ATI video cards under
Windows come to mind...), but your customers could easily want BM+FR
support without the best Sync card around, and others want a superior
Sync card without BM+FR. You're narrowing your customer base to the
intersection of those two sets, instead of widening it to the the
union of the sets. Your choice.

> 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.

Related to my comments about, a production environment could consist of 
either of my two examples.

> 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 many people here understand that already, see my comments above
about one way we might accomplish this together. You seem to be taking 
people's suggestions here as criticism, and I don't quite follow why that
is. People are trying to suggest ways that we can help you support your
product in ongoing versions of the OS, and help with your resource 
limitations. I doubt your business plans are really opposed to that, we
just need to see how to make your desires mesh with ours. As for harping,
this is a free OS group, we're big fans of source, you need to expect 
that.

As a seperate question, do you publish enough details about your hardware
to allow someone to write their own driver? (Understanding that it's not
a 'simple' task to write a good one.) If you do, perhaps you could offer
'your' driver at a price, with your BM+FR software, and maintain it for
release versions, and people with the need could run the 'free' driver
if they need to run -current for a while.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net --> Mastery of UNIX, like
mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear,
but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live
in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. - Thomas Scoville