I'm sure there are other things I could have said, but I'm hoping someone
else will say them too.
Remember to be civil.
Dean
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 12:46:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dean Gaudet <dgaudet@steam.com>
To: info@i2osig.org
Subject: regarding proprietary standards
It has come to my attention that the new I2O standard is proprietary,
requiring NDA to receive. I would like to know why this requirement
exists. It prevents successful free operating systems like Linux,
FreeBSD, and OpenBSD from taking advantage of this new hardware. Doing
that hurts not only companies that rely on this software, but it also
hurts educational and research institutions which use these free operating
systems to perform their research.
Individuals and companies choose such free operating systems not only
because of the cost, because certainly the "cost" is a nebulous concept
that doesn't include the person-time required to "smooth out the edges"
that polished commercial packages typically do for you. They choose free
operating systems because they have the source code, and can modify the
operating system to suit their specific need. The modifications are
sometimes bug fixes, and security fixes. But more often than not the
changes are for performance -- to get more out of the hardware.
The motherboard industry is sure to lose potential revenue from this
status of the standard. Users will prefer to buy non-I2O boards over I2O
boards because they cannot use the extra hardware on an I2O board.
Please reconsider this position.
Dean Gaudet
Technical Consultant, Server and Network Architecture
Steam Tunnel Operations <http://www.steam.com/>