Development question

[CS DBA]

On 2/7/14, 3:27 PM, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On 02/07/2014 01:54 PM, CS DBA issued this missive:
>> Hi All;
>>
>> It seems to me that the "marriage" that Microsoft & Apple enjoy per
>> hardware designed for their software gives them a huge advantage. I see
>> that the Linux community is quite good at coming up with drivers,
>> software, etc for hardware after the fact.
>
> It's a bit more the other way around. The hardware is designed first,
> then they share the specs with the software vendors. It's logical in
> the sense that they'd have a better shot at getting some money out of
> M$ or Apple than the open-source community.
>
> One example of this was with the old TI wireless chips...you _could_
> poke a register in the hardware that could cause the chip to transmit
> at a higher level than the FCC would allow. Obviously, that's sort of
> illegal so they kept the interface of that chip under tight lock and
> key and only told Microsoft about it. For several years the only driver
> that would work was Microsoft's. The chip was discontinued after a
> couple of years.
>
> This continues with the firmware required for certain wireless chips
> and such...it's only available from M$ or Apple and we've had to
> create a program that rips the code out of the M$/Apple files and puts
> it in a format our OS can use.
>
>> I wonder, what could be accomplished if a Linux based distro had the
>> same advantage?  I'm in the early stages of researching just such a
>> company.
>
> It's been tried before and didn't work (Linuxware, Linux Hardware, Inc.
> to name two). The economics of the OSS way of thinking and commercial
> endeavors don't necessarily mesh well.
>
>> We'll be setting up some infrastructure around community involvement and
>> feedback, however I'd be interested in any initial feedback you all 
>> have.
>>
>> I'm thinking that the OS would remain fully open source (GPL) and we'd
>> license the hardware specs in the same way.
>>
>> Then we could release laptops & desktops that truly have an advantage.
>> The company would couple a solid Linux distro with it's own tweaks
>> (polish & branding & such) coupled with our own hardware.
>>
>> I suspect that instead of waiting for the current HW vendors to release
>> new hardware and then quickly figure out how to interface with it we can
>> put effort into polish and functionality and quickly become the trend
>> setters for MS and Apple to follow.
>
> In many cases, if the HW vendors would just release the damned specs to
> the OSS community, we wouldn't have to reverse-engineer so much stuff.
> As it stands now, we have to get some other OS that does talk to it,
> then instrument that and plow through the findings to figure out how to
> talk to the hardware. Open specs would allow the OSS groups to get
> started right away without all that rigmarole.
>
> There are some vendors (such as nVidia and Intel) that do pretty
> actively support OSS. I wish the others would.  Most peripheral HW
> vendors (but by no means all) hamstring OSS by only sharing their docs
> with the "big boys". Part of that is that they aren't likely to realize
> an immediate return on their investment, but a large part of it is they
> don't want to have to support fourteen-gazillion derivative operating
> systems. I've been there and logistically it's a bloody nightmare.
>
> I applaud your efforts and hope you'll have better luck than we've seen
> in the past in such endeavors.

Thanks, I think part of the issue is timing. I hope the timing is right, 
we're seeing a LOT of HW that caters to what the vendors want at the 
expense of what the end users are asking for.... That's my theory.

I'll keep you posted



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> - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks at alldigital.com -
> - AIM/Skype: therps2        ICQ: 22643734            Yahoo: origrps2 -
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> - Millihelen (n): The amount of beauty required to launch one ship.  -
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