From alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz  Mon Mar  1 18:19:35 1999
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Date: Mon, 01 Mar 1999 09:14:48 -0800
To: alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz
From: "Kevin Duffey" <kduffey@inprise.com>
Subject: Re: Trident's contribution, a draft
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>I think Bob Young (RedHat) has a good analogy for this. Would you buy
>a car with the hood locked so that only the car company could fix it?
>I may not have the ability to work on the engine, but maybe my uncle,
>or thousands of other mechanics, could fix any problems I might have.

Good point. But..will those mechanics take your car, make many more from
it, then sell it themselves and make money off of it? Its a "decent"
analogy, except in the software business when people are writing software
to make a living, you cant always give away your code. I think it also says
to people that the software is not supported by a single established
company..its supported by many people. That could be a good thing, and a
bad. For a companies reputation, it could say to people "hey..we aren't
good enough..so we will give our source code away and hope other people out
there make it better". I know I sure wouldn't want to buy software from
that company. Which is why I dont buy MS windows. It sucks. Worse..people
cant fix it! :)


>I think the danger is that someone could write a really bad driver
>and then say they support linux. How shocked would you be when you
>purchased a sound card because the box said "includes linux drivers",
>only to find out you have to run linux 1.0, or since the company
>later discontinues the card, it has no reason to continue support of 
>of the driver. Or the company goes out of business. 

This I semi-agree with. The thing is, if a company is to go out of
business, or cant support it, then by all means they should release the
code freely so others can.





Kevin Duffey
kduffey@inprise.com

