On Sunday 16 September 2001 23:53, Brian Paul wrote:
> Anyway, those are my hunches. I could probably play devil's advocate
> and come up with more issues but those are the first that come to mind.
Those are the ones that come immediately to mind whenever I've actually
gotten into frank (no pun intended) discussions with the hardware vendors
while politely trying to get them to part with needed info. They just don't
understand and are really afraid of the competition doing things to them with
the information they might give out. I could bore the list with the varying
stories of the hoops I've jumped through with hardware vendors to get at
technical data- NDA's, vendors not giving out enough even under NDA (SiS...),
vendors promising stuff and then never carrying through (AdvanSys and TriTech
come _immediately_ to mind for that one...), etc.
Heck, I can't even get SiS to part with technical data for their 3D support
on the 300 series chipsets- and my employer's got an NDA with them and we're
the primary embedded software partner with one of their larger customers, ECS
Elitegroup. "SiS generally does not give out the 3D programming
information," was the response from our US contact for SiS. Our response,
"Does that mean that SiS plans on continuing their support of the 2D and 3D
functionalites under Linux since without it, we cannot?" No reply has been
forthcoming from that return missive.
All you can be is patient. All you can be is polite. They can't see money
in the old hardware- if it's in service, it means that at least some of the
people won't upgrade. They don't see that it's in their best interests-
even though there's people that can't "upgrade" that use their parts (Laptops
come immediately to mind here...). You have to quietly educate them that
it's really in their best interests overall to be helpful to those who
genuinely want to help them out by providing support for old and new chipsets
for operating systems that they don't have time to support.
--
Frank Earl
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