[openbeos] Re: bounties for the new website...wifi

> On 8/29/06, Curtis Wanner <katisu@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > They have also been very uncooperative with releasing specs to open 
> > source
> > projects.  A driver will require information from reverse 
> > engineering and
> > would be suspect at best.
> 
> Being that the norm and not the exception, I'm afraid that for the
> time being (that means: until R3+) some sort of NDIS wrapper would be
> much more beneficial to Haiku than spending developer resources on
> reverse-engineering or clean-room rewriting drivers based on
> documentation derived from GPL'd source or whatnot.
> 
> FWIW, that's just what yT did. And in my opinion writing an one-shot
> wrapper which would enable one to tap into the ENORMOUS driver 
> library
> available for Windows was a brilliant decision. Native drivers may
> then come as resources allow.

Except that ethically it's really not a good option.
It makes it possible to use hardware without OSS driver/open specs.
So it is one less incentive to hardware makers not to open their specs.
"why do you want the specs ? you can use it already can't you ?"

But from a user point of view it effectively is the best solution 
in the short term.

François.

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