ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Piotr Makowski]

Hi Piotr,

thank you very much for your email.
The data sheet and information you request does not exist in any format that
we could provide and frankly, we are way too busy with our normal work to
prepare something like that in a way that would be of general use and would
resemble what you require in your request.
I am well aware of the general request and I know the text you sent us
pretty well ... I have seen it many times before in various versions,
usually copied via cut & paste and sent to us in one way or another ... and
actually I am a bit tired of it. Unfortunatly we believe that the text and
the way the request is sent to us is not really useful and not tailored at
all to the special requirements that are common in this industry (pro audio
/ higher level sound card manufacturers) and that make this industry very
different from your auverage computer component manufacturer. It's my
personal experience, following the ALSA developer community for years, that
this sort of basic cultural understanding is only slowly changing
step-by-step but at a much slower pace than it could happen. Unfortunatly
the majority of ALSA developers still seem to be "computer guys" and not
"music guys" ... causing all sorts of problems that won't help to resolve
the culture crash between the different parties. Most "music" companies work
in a different way than typical IT companies. Our business are much smaller,
and time of every single employee is extremly critical for us. I guess this
all may sound ignorant to you, but please understand that I know what I am
talking about to a pretty good extent (you can actually look up my name on
the ALSA site where I am listed under contributors -
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/ALSA_contributors - so I have
experience on both sides).
Again, we are happy to be in contact with the individual developer who is
actually doing the development. If you volunteer to do the development
yourself and/or if you know someone who would do it, please inform me and we
can go from there.
Please don't get me wrong, I understand what you want and where you are
coming from, but this direct contact with the developer is a basic
requirement for us - sorry.
Best regards,
Claus Riethmueller
Managing Director ESI Audiotechnik GmbH

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Piotr Makowski]

Reffering to the Claus Riethmueller reply (from ESI )
I would like to announce that
*we are looking for the competent driver programmer.*
Anybody who could take on this quest or know somebody to contact with,
please do
it.
We were waiting for ESI MAYA44 drivers for a long time. I think, this is the
great moment to write them at last!!
I count on you.

Regards,
Piotr Makowski

2007/8/22, Piotr Makowski <oponek@gmail.com>:
>
> Hi Piotr,
>
> thank you very much for your email.
> The data sheet and information you request does not exist in any format
> that we could provide and frankly, we are way too busy with our normal work
> to prepare something like that in a way that would be of general use and
> would resemble what you require in your request.
> I am well aware of the general request and I know the text you sent us
> pretty well ... I have seen it many times before in various versions,
> usually copied via cut & paste and sent to us in one way or another ... and
> actually I am a bit tired of it. Unfortunatly we believe that the text and
> the way the request is sent to us is not really useful and not tailored at
> all to the special requirements that are common in this industry (pro audio
> / higher level sound card manufacturers) and that make this industry very
> different from your auverage computer component manufacturer. It's my
> personal experience, following the ALSA developer community for years, that
> this sort of basic cultural understanding is only slowly changing
> step-by-step but at a much slower pace than it could happen. Unfortunatly
> the majority of ALSA developers still seem to be "computer guys" and not
> "music guys" ... causing all sorts of problems that won't help to resolve
> the culture crash between the different parties. Most "music" companies work
> in a different way than typical IT companies. Our business are much smaller,
> and time of every single employee is extremly critical for us. I guess this
> all may sound ignorant to you, but please understand that I know what I am
> talking about to a pretty good extent (you can actually look up my name on
> the ALSA site where I am listed under contributors -
> http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/ALSA_contributors - so I have
> experience on both sides).
> Again, we are happy to be in contact with the individual developer who is
> actually doing the development. If you volunteer to do the development
> yourself and/or if you know someone who would do it, please inform me and we
> can go from there.
> Please don't get me wrong, I understand what you want and where you are
> coming from, but this direct contact with the developer is a basic
> requirement for us - sorry.
> Best regards,
> Claus Riethmueller
> Managing Director ESI Audiotechnik GmbH
>

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Piotr Makowski wrote:
> Hi Piotr,
>
> thank you very much for your email.
> The data sheet and information you request does not exist in any format that
> we could provide and frankly, we are way too busy with our normal work to
> prepare something like that in a way that would be of general use and would
> resemble what you require in your request.
>   
<snip>
> Please don't get me wrong, I understand what you want and where you are
> coming from, but this direct contact with the developer is a basic
> requirement for us - sorry.
> Best regards,
> Claus Riethmueller
> Managing Director ESI Audiotechnik GmbH
>   

Hi,

So, basically, ESI cannot help us.
I am amazed that they can write any sort of driver without some sort of 
datasheet.
But I do know it does happen, because I have received datasheets that 
were only written years after a particular sound card was first sold.
I would like to stress, that the datasheet does not have to be perfect. 
We would be quite happy if it has spelling mistakes in, and some wrongly 
labeled registers.
I have received datasheets from other manufactures where some engineer 
has just scribbled some notes on the back of a piece of paper.
The important point I am trying to make is that the data about the sound 
card does not have to prettily laid out or even 100% accurate. We just 
need something that helps save us time in developing a driver. Ideally, 
it should be in some editable electronic format, so that ALSA developers 
can edit and correct errors in the document as and when they find them.

Now, if ESI cannot even provide this, we should highlight ESI in RED in 
the sound card matrix.

Kind Regards

James

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Claus Riethmueller]

Hi James,

please let me say first that I am not intending this as any personal comment
as I am pretty sure you are not the only person with similar thoughts about
the discussion.

Yet, I have to say that it is exactly the somewhat ignorant attitude that
turns us and quite a number of other vendors "off" in supporting the ALSA
developer community better. It is what I have refered to in my email to
Piotr that he cut & pasted to this mailing list (without asking for
permission btw.). I have been following the developments at ALSA since many
years now and worked with a number of different developers for different
products to get them working properly. Many of our products are supported
just fine under ALSA and both the developers and the users seemed to
appreciate that fact. Unfortunatly your comments show your obvious lack of
understanding about how some companies are working in this industry and what
sort of approach is needed by you guys to get better support from us. This
is why I used the term "culture crash" in my email.

> So, basically, ESI cannot help us.
> I am amazed that they can write any sort of driver without some sort of 
> datasheet.

Well ... frankly, it should not be your concern on how we are developing
drivers for our hardware designs (which are ours). What you wrote is a cheap
comment and I do not see how it could be an appropriate comment if you look
at everything what I wrote and not just the introduction. The way (format,
style and most important in our case: language) we store our internal
company data is no ones concern except mine and the concern of my employees.

We are not developing our products with the purpose to share this
information with others. It is not part of our business model. We are not a
chipset vendor and we are not making designs that other companies are
supposed to use or work with. Our data is used inside our company and
nowhere else. Every document that goes out to the public must go through a
process that is aprooved by a number of people, written by the actual
responsible person, in our case partially even translated into another
language by someone who is not an expert on the issue and only then could be
sent out. Unless we have to do that to achieve something we want to achieve,
we simply can't do that. This might be different with other companies you've
been in contact with (I saw you developed major parts of the drivers for
various Creative devices and can probably guess that this is where main
parts of your experience come from) where there are more people available
that could get and go through such tasks. I could now add information about
company and market sizes, etc. but that would make everything only more
complicated (that's the type of discussion that is nice in combination with
a few beers in a pub at some late evening ...).

What I did in the introduction of my email to Piotr was to mention this fact
about our situation without going into any details. I am probably saying
more about how our company works than what many other vendors ever would
disclose about themselve. I hoped it would help to improve the understanding
of "the other side". Your comments are disapointing and puzzle me a little
bit, but unfortunatly I have to say that I have expected something like this
from my past experience. Luckily not all ALSA contributors / developers
share your views as the fact that many of our products (as well as quite a
number of products from other vendors) are supported in ALSA at this moment
without having the document (you think) you need, speaks for itself I might
add.

> But I do know it does happen, because I have received datasheets that 
> were only written years after a particular sound card was first sold.
> I would like to stress, that the datasheet does not have to be perfect. 
> We would be quite happy if it has spelling mistakes in, and some wrongly 
> labeled registers.
> I have received datasheets from other manufactures where some engineer 
> has just scribbled some notes on the back of a piece of paper.

At least you acknowledge that this happens which I think is quite positive.
I am not saying that what you mention here resembles what goes on in our
company, but it is not that far from the actual situation. If you add that
our engineers are in Korea and make their notes mostly in Korea, you get a
little bit closer to the real picture. Of course we have documents but they
are not ready in any way that I would approove sending them out to the
public.

> Now, if ESI cannot even provide this, we should highlight ESI in RED in 
> the sound card matrix.

As you can guess, it was this sentence that prompted me to reply directly to
the list. In my opinion, your comment is unfair and simply ignoring major
parts of what I wrote in my mail to Piotr. I have shown a certain level of
commitment and your response basically tells me that you are not even
interested ... if more people would share your views, ALSA would have made
no development at all in the last 5 years I guess.

Our engineers are all happy to answer questions and provide assistance and
help if required. As I said, we are happy to be in contact with an
individual developer who is actually doing the development. It is a lot less
time consuming and for us a lot more simple (actually, I believe it is more
simple for the developer on the ALSA end as well but I realize some people
might disagree here).

I'm sorry if this long mail has distracted a few people from the daily
discussion about fixing bugs and improving code, but I am sure there are
enough people that understand where I am coming from and what I wrote here.
I do not want to start a long discussion here, so I also do not intend to
comment on the whole issue further on the mailing list. Contact me directly
and we can go from there (as I mentioned in my mail to Piotr).

Best regards,

Claus Riethmueller
Managing Director ESI Audiotechnik GmbH

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Adrian McMenamin]

On 22/08/07, Claus Riethmueller <claus@esi-audio.com> wrote:
>
> Our engineers are all happy to answer questions and provide assistance and
> help if required. As I said, we are happy to be in contact with an
> individual developer who is actually doing the development. It is a lot less
> time consuming and for us a lot more simple (actually, I believe it is more
> simple for the developer on the ALSA end as well but I realize some people
> might disagree here).
>

Rather than have a flame war, this is what we should concentrate on!

This is an offer that shouldn't be passed over.

As I said before I would be happy to volunteer as developer of last
resort. But probably one of the core team would be better.

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Rene Herman]

On 08/22/2007 06:03 PM, Adrian McMenamin wrote:

> On 22/08/07, Claus Riethmueller <claus@esi-audio.com> wrote:
>> Our engineers are all happy to answer questions and provide assistance and
>> help if required. As I said, we are happy to be in contact with an
>> individual developer who is actually doing the development. It is a lot less
>> time consuming and for us a lot more simple (actually, I believe it is more
>> simple for the developer on the ALSA end as well but I realize some people
>> might disagree here).
>>
> 
> Rather than have a flame war, this is what we should concentrate on!
> 
> This is an offer that shouldn't be passed over.
> 
> As I said before I would be happy to volunteer as developer of last
> resort. But probably one of the core team would be better.

Do any have the hardware?

Rene.

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Pieter Palmers]

Claus Riethmueller wrote:

...

> 
>> Now, if ESI cannot even provide this, we should highlight ESI in RED in 
>> the sound card matrix.
> 
> As you can guess, it was this sentence that prompted me to reply directly to
> the list. In my opinion, your comment is unfair and simply ignoring major
> parts of what I wrote in my mail to Piotr. I have shown a certain level of
> commitment and your response basically tells me that you are not even
> interested ... if more people would share your views, ALSA would have made
> no development at all in the last 5 years I guess.
> 

I think it is only fair to mention that for FreeBoB, ESI was the first 
company to provide us with hardware to develop with. They provided us 
with a QuataFire610 even before we had a single line of code. Compared 
to the hassle we experience with other vendors, even to date, I consider 
this a very open and constructive attitude.

Greets,

Pieter Palmers
FreeBoB/FFADO developer

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Takashi Iwai]

Hi Claus,

first, it's really appreciated that we have such a communication from
your side.

At Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:22:05 +0200,
Claus Riethmueller wrote:
> 
> Hi James,
> 
> please let me say first that I am not intending this as any personal comment
> as I am pretty sure you are not the only person with similar thoughts about
> the discussion.
> 
> Yet, I have to say that it is exactly the somewhat ignorant attitude that
> turns us and quite a number of other vendors "off" in supporting the ALSA
> developer community better. It is what I have refered to in my email to
> Piotr that he cut & pasted to this mailing list (without asking for
> permission btw.). I have been following the developments at ALSA since many
> years now and worked with a number of different developers for different
> products to get them working properly. Many of our products are supported
> just fine under ALSA and both the developers and the users seemed to
> appreciate that fact. Unfortunatly your comments show your obvious lack of
> understanding about how some companies are working in this industry and what
> sort of approach is needed by you guys to get better support from us. This
> is why I used the term "culture crash" in my email.

I know this kind of conflicts well from my long experience, and I'm
sure that James also knows.  The fact is, that there are minimum
requirements for the driver development, and it couldn't be seen from
the cited mail.

> > So, basically, ESI cannot help us.
> > I am amazed that they can write any sort of driver without some sort of 
> > datasheet.
> 
> Well ... frankly, it should not be your concern on how we are developing
> drivers for our hardware designs (which are ours). What you wrote is a cheap
> comment and I do not see how it could be an appropriate comment if you look
> at everything what I wrote and not just the introduction. The way (format,
> style and most important in our case: language) we store our internal
> company data is no ones concern except mine and the concern of my employees.

As James mentioned, the datasheet is vial.  "SOME SORT OF" datasheet
is.  Yes, this can be any document.  It can be even a document under
NDA, at least, for the beginning of the development.  (But they are
often released later in the public place after rewrite.)

But, when the information is given under NDA, the most important thing
is that we are allowed to write the driver without *any* restriction.
It means that even all information in the datasheet could be
documented as comments.  (Of course, we focus only on the technical
stuff, so there haven't been problems about it.) 
In other words, for the open-source development, NDA is nothing but a
formal paper work :)  After all, it'll be a question of trust.

Oh, BTW, please don't misinterpret: NDA is the last choice.  The
public document from the beginning is the very best.

(snip)
> Our engineers are all happy to answer questions and provide assistance and
> help if required. As I said, we are happy to be in contact with an
> individual developer who is actually doing the development. It is a lot less
> time consuming and for us a lot more simple (actually, I believe it is more
> simple for the developer on the ALSA end as well but I realize some people
> might disagree here).

Some people are already interested in the development, so it would
work actually if they can receive an actual hardware for testing
(yes, the test hardware is another vital factor).

The development (driver writing) itself doesn't have to be driven by
the core ALSA developers.  They, including me, are often too busy by
other tasks.  So, other interested developers could work better on it,
I guess.  But, it'll be anyway nice to keep in touch with ALSA
developers (i.e. adding them to Cc in mails).  This will make the
later maintenance job a lot easier.


thanks,

Takashi

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Rene Herman]

On 08/22/2007 11:50 PM, Takashi Iwai wrote:

> As James mentioned, the datasheet is vial.  "SOME SORT OF" datasheet
> is.  Yes, this can be any document.

Where existing Windows driver source would, I assume, count as "some sort".

Rene.

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Takashi Iwai]

At Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:09:55 +0200,
Rene Herman wrote:
> 
> On 08/22/2007 11:50 PM, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> 
> > As James mentioned, the datasheet is vial.  "SOME SORT OF" datasheet
> > is.  Yes, this can be any document.
> 
> Where existing Windows driver source would, I assume, count as "some sort".

Well, as my personal preference, Windows driver source code isn't
suitable as the primary information source.  It's good as a reference,
for example, for debugging a bug in your driver.
But, the proprietary driver code is often hard to disclose publicly
than the other technical documents.  And, above all, when you write a
driver based on windows code, it tends to result in a bad code ;)


Takashi

Re: ESI reply!! (MAYA44 datasheet request)

[Tobin Davis]

I can attest to that.  I had to port a Windows driver to Linux for an
internal test card (the card & code never left the building).  The
Windows code was ~50k lines long, and did the exact same thing as my
final Linux driver of ~7500 lines.  Part of the problem was all of the
Windows API's that needed to be included.  Another problem was the
Windows driver was written in C++ with heavy OO code.

Tobin

On Thu, 2007-08-23 at 00:42 +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:

> At Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:09:55 +0200,
> Rene Herman wrote:
> > 
> > On 08/22/2007 11:50 PM, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > 
> > > As James mentioned, the datasheet is vial.  "SOME SORT OF" datasheet
> > > is.  Yes, this can be any document.
> > 
> > Where existing Windows driver source would, I assume, count as "some sort".
> 
> Well, as my personal preference, Windows driver source code isn't
> suitable as the primary information source.  It's good as a reference,
> for example, for debugging a bug in your driver.
> But, the proprietary driver code is often hard to disclose publicly
> than the other technical documents.  And, above all, when you write a
> driver based on windows code, it tends to result in a bad code ;)
> 
> 
> Takashi
> _______________________________________________
> Alsa-devel mailing list
> Alsa-devel@alsa-project.org
> http://mailman.alsa-project.org/mailman/listinfo/alsa-devel

-- 
Tobin Davis  


Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.
		-- Herodotus