[tulip] tulip on solaris

Thomas Dodd ted@cypress.com
Thu, 22 Feb 2001 17:00:58 -0600


Donald Becker wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Thomas Dodd wrote:
> > Or you could dual license the driver so we could port it.
> 
> What would my motivation be?
> The tulip driver has between one and two man-years of effort, it didn't
> produce any revenue.

As I said in a part you cut. I respect YOUR choices
with YOUR work. I grateful to have it out there.
$20 NIC's that work great. And even Netgear's
patched driver sucked. And It won't work with newer
kernels (I don't think it will, haven't tried it)

I know I could port the driver for local use,
but feel it'd be a shame to not be able to
let others use it to. Assuming I even got it
to work, which I probably couldn't do any way.

> And Sun's contribution would be...?
> Sun has a stunning market cap, a big revenue base, and thousands of
> developers.  They still felt the need to put out a porting kit to use
> the Linux network driver code, because they couldn't develop it in-house.

And they aren't anywhere near as good as you plus the thousands
of testers you have. I also didn't know they had a porting kit
for drivers. All I've seen is lxrun, and it's x86 only.
 
> Feel free to release your code into the public domain or under a BSD
> license.  After a few years you'll find that you've only made a
> short-term contribution to society.  Companies with proprietary software
> will take from the public domain and hide the code origin.

As I said, I don't have anything worth releasing. Most
of it is hacks an kludges for short term use. I personal
changes to other work, like changing defaults or switch
names to be easier for me.
 
> > I wouldn't want Sun/HP/SGI to port the code and add only the binary to
> > their OS, with out my permission and without telling users where the
> > code came from either.
> 
> That is what would happen.
> Remove HP and SGI from the list, but Sun, QNX, Lynx, and Treck have all
> used my driver code in violation of the license.

Didn't know that. I truly dislike that way of doing things.
I understand better you reasons now.
Between that, and you past arguments with Linus, I glad
you are still working on the drivers.

	-Thomas