Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 6th Jul 2005 18:44 UTC
OpenBSD De Raadt's team makes OpenBSD, an operating system, and OpenSSH, for secure communications. Here, he talks about why he does it, about industry use of open-source software, and about dedication to quality paying off.
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Binary drivers in the FreeBSD tree?
by on Thu 7th Jul 2005 09:50 UTC

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From TFA:

`FreeBSD is not doing this; they’re incorporating binary device drivers all the way through their tree now when it’s more convenient. They’re saying convenience over freedom.'

Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Thanks.

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Member since:

I'm not sure about the binary drivers throughout the source tree, but I do know that they incorparte a lot of code which is more restrictive than the BSD license. I think that maybe he was referring to this as well.

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Member since:

If you spent five minutes looking around you'd know.

There was a spat a while ago between OpenBSD and FreeBSD developers because of OpenBSD's anti-binary cruft stance.

Scott Long, who made the Adaptec aac cli - a binary that is used to control Adaptec RAID cards, went apeshit because Theo told Adaptec that after 4 months of talks, if Adaptec didn't give documentation for their aac cards, support would be dropped.

Scott, being a former Adaptec worker, said that the cli was good enough and that Theo and OpenBSD should stop causing trouble for everyone and bullying vendors around.

Reply Parent Score: 0

haugland Member since:
2005-07-07

Hmmm... I do not see Theo is bullying a vendor, if he says that he will stop supporting their product if they do not comply with certain terms. This happen all the time. Hardware will also have to comply to certain terms to be approved for MS Windows. Theo may have different requirements because of his goals, but the principle is the same: "You must comply to these terms if you want us to support your hardware".

I actually think Theo is offering to support Adaptec's products if they will supply the documentation. Adaptec can always decline. Users can still use whatever hardware they want, but it will not be supported.

Reply Parent Score: 1