[openbeosnetteam] Re: porting FreeBSD's new netstack
- From: Waldemar Kornewald <Waldemar.Kornewald@xxxxxx>
- To: openbeosnetteam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 10:52:06 +0200
Lars Hansson wrote:
The NDIS wrapper is the devil's gift to open source development.
While it may seem like it solves a problem what it really does is mitigate
the symptoms ("card X doesnt work") while making the root problem
("company X doesnt release chipset API specifications") worse.
Also, it only works on ix86.
The Haiku core should, imho, not include such functionality and it
should be left to distros to add it if they want to.
As long as Windows rules the market this will not change. Most companies
will rather write their own drivers than release an open-source version.
If Haiku ever becomes successful (20% Desktop market share,
pre-installed with many computers, etc.) those companies will write
drivers, but we cannot get them to release source/specs because they
have too much fear of other companies finding out how their hardware
works by decoding the register layout.
The NDIS wrapper helps us to get market share. We cannot live without
drivers and currently it is the only possibility for us to get them. I
am sure some companies will release native drivers when they think we
are important, but I would not count on them releasing source or
specs...except we do not release any source to the public.
I strongly hope that I am wrong, not realistic.
Bye,
Waldemar
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