Rationale for not releasing drivers as FOSS
Jon maddog Hall
maddog at li.org
Tue Jan 10 09:22:00 EST 2006
mkomarinski at wayga.org said:
> In case you're wondering why they did this, it was cheaper for them to have
> one manufacturing line for the cards and it also allowed them to make either
> version of the card on demand.
In the mid-1970s Aetna Life and Casualty (at that time the largest commercial
user of IBM in the free world) decided to upgrade an IBM mainframe. The
upgrade cost something like 1.5 million dollars, which was a lot of money back
in those days. IBM came in to do the upgrade, which we expected to take
DAYS with RACKS of equipment. The rep reached into his case, pulled out a
floppy disk (8" back in those days) and stuck it into the CPU. Ten minutes
later we had our upgrade.
As the brain surgeon said, "You are not paying for the ten minutes in the
operating room, you are paying for the twenty years of study where to gouge."
md
--
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org 80 Amherst St.
Voice: +1.603.672.4557 Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
WWW: http://www.li.org
Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association
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