Re: [LONG RANT] Re: Linux stifles innovation...

["Nicholas Knight" <tegeran@home.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Garzik" <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>
To: "Nicholas Knight" <tegeran@home.com>
Cc: <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 3:47 AM
Subject: Re: [LONG RANT] Re: Linux stifles innovation...


> On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Nicholas Knight wrote:
> > From: "Jeff Garzik" <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>
>

<snip>

> > While I understand that internal docs and source are often simply a
mess, I
> > fail to see why this should prevent a company from releasing specs or
> > source.
> > Sure somebody will come along and say "What on earth were you people
> > THINKING?!", and then they'll get over it and do something useful with
the
> > specs and/or source to the drivers (or if they don't, somebody else
will)
> > I seriously doubt it'd lead to a company seeing a drop in sales because
of
> > it... and even if they did, I'd say it's a calculated risk, as they
could
> > well pick up a higher number of new customers than the number of old
> > customers they lost due to wider ranging support.
> > And even if their specs and code were the worst peices of trash on the
> > planet, I'd still thank them for opening them up to the public.
>
> You might thank them.  The other opinion is... people look at the
> newly-released garbage source code, and say "wow, the driver I'm running
> is shit.  I'm switching to another type of hardware."  etc.
>
> Maybe harmless, maybe PR disaster.

As I said, calculated risk.
I suppose if it was in a truely horrible state and the company wasn't a
large company such as IBM or HP that could probably afford to take the risk,
I could understand them being unwilling to release the source and spec
sheets.
Double edged swords run rampant in the computer industry... *sigh*

My dream is probably quite similar to that of every geek on earth... open,
standard protocols and API's for *everything* that allows for quick and easy
driver and software development, another layer if you will, but getting
hundreds of companies that tend to be addicted to closed everything to agree
on the standards would probably be next to impossible... prehaps it's time
some thought went into how to make this a reality, or are large scale
efforts for this already going on that I haven't noticed?

>
> Jeff

-NK