Rationale for not releasing drivers as FOSS

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Tue Jan 10 10:35:01 EST 2006


On 1/10/06, Mark Komarinski <mkomarinski at wayga.org> wrote:
> A company I previously worked for had two models of a card that were
> exactly identical except for the exterior markings and the contents of a
> PROM that was on the card.

  Promise Tech has a few "RAID" cards that do just that.  (RAID in
quotes because the cards are really just regular IDE adapters with the
RAID done in the driver on the host.)  The problem is that the user
community discovered this and figured out how to hack the driver to
give you the "RAID" functionality on the "ordinary adapter" cards. 
(I'm sure the industry is looking to make that kind of thing illegal
and punishable by death or something.)

  On a related note: The difference between some current Intel Pentium
and the Celeron chips is that the Celerons have half the cache of the
Pentium's.  Except they're actually the same chip; Intel just disables
half the onboard cache as part of the "manufacturing process" for the
Celerons.  I'm told they use a laser to burn out a single connection
on the die.

  It's a strange world we live in.

-- Ben



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