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OpenBSD gets hit the hardest because the devs are the most hardline about never signing an NDA or otherwise impairing the freeness of the drivers.
by juped 5y ago
OpenBSD gets hit the hardest because the devs are the most hardline about never signing an NDA or otherwise impairing the freeness of the drivers.
- MisterTea 5y agoI agree with never signing an NDA because it leads to code which can not be reliably maintained as the only person who can maintain it is the person who signed the NDA. How do you perform code audits on those drivers? I have to assume most Linux WiFi drivers are written by people working for companies who get to see documentation via NDA as part of a company project OR the driver was written by the manufacturer who already knows how to talk to the card. So everyone else has to cargo cult those drivers by blindly copying the voodoo code and hope it initializes the card the same way it does in Linux. Someone suggested adding a driver compatibility layer to allow using FreeBSD drivers in 9front but the devs shot it down with "that layer would be bigger than the kernel itself" So now you're now responsible for maintaining that HUGE mess plus you're still dealing with black box drivers you hope someone else fixes when they don't work. No one wins. Again, the damn hardware manufactures have to give us proper hardware documentation. Until then they can go suck an egg.
- nix23 5y ago>Until then they can go suck an egg. No, we suck an egg...that's the problem.