[sclug] Motherboards and SATA

[Alex Butcher]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Matt wrote:

> * Alex Butcher <lug at assursys.co.uk> [2004-04-05 19:08:30]:
> > 
> > I (try to) spend my money with companies that don't have broken business
> > models.
> 
> It's odd, Adaptec appear to be completely behind development of drivers
> for their SCSI and RAID adapters, and at least with the former, appear
> to have been for quite a while. I've only ever purchased Adaptec cards
> for x86 boxen and they've always worked flawlessly under Linux and *BSD,
> (usually because it's the same multi-platform driver), even Windows too
> if I'm honest and have memory that goes back that far :-)
> 
> I think for some of these 'consumer' products such as SATA and USB, they
> appear to be just rebadging third party products/controllers rather than
> brewing their own hardware, which may explain the difference in driver
> quality/availability.

Ooh, that's another reason why sometimes the drivers aren't open; the
"manufacturer" you've purchased from doesn't have the necessary rights to
distribute the source; I gather that some of the IPR in nVidia's driver
belongs to SGI and Microsoft, and some of the code in the drivers for one of
Intel's old graphics chips was tied up with the US DoD (of all people, but
if you think for about 5 seconds, you can probably guess why...)

> Matt

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>