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OpenBSD Clashes with Adaptec In Quest for Docs
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Mar 20, 2005 02:54 PM
from the not-support-you-note-they-note dept.
from the not-support-you-note-they-note dept.
TrumpetPower! writes "OpenBSD developers have been asking for documentation from Adaptec for over four months. Adaptec's response has been to deliberately misunderstand what is being asked of them. A former Adaptec employee admits that the hardware is buggy and tricky to get right. So, as a result, OpenBSD 3.7 will ship without Adaptec RAID support. Personally, I'm glad that Theo isn't resting on his laurels."
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Mhrmnhrm writes "After totally closing off public access to documentation for their chips roughly five years ago, Hifn is again offering them, but with an invasive registration requirement. Needless to say, Theo de Raadt and the rest of the OpenBSD team were not amused, and following a Hifn manager's missive, the gauntlet has been thrown. Either open the docs fully, or be removed from the system. This wouldn't be the first time... the same thing happened to both Adaptec and Intel following similar spats."
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Why just OpenBSD? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why just documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are under an obligation to provide usefulness on legit architectures, but they aren't doing that. Adaptec should get over their shame of bugs, and allow the driver people at OpenBSD a chance at making things work.
There is no general fix for this problem, often specs are released way too late. On the other hand, releasing open source drivers will open specs for the same device. These specs aren't just trade secrets, they're actually necessary for building drivers.
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly what obligation does Adaptec have?
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays, I purchase equipment based more on its compatibility with FreeBSD (and occasionally OpenBSD) than any other factor (incl. performance and price), as that's what it's going to be used with.
As far as responsibility or obligation is concerned, Adaptec's got none to the Open Source community, unless you can consider it a direct failure of its responsibility to its shareholders. Just because Open Source is "fighting the good fight", doesn't mean anyone owes us anything.
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think the company has the right to refuse to release specs, but we don't have the right to complain or to reverse engineer them, and that they have the right to whine to the gov't if we do so.
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Informative)
And how else do you propose to effect change? Shut and sit down isn't going to work is it?
Whining, boycotting, shaming, humiliating, mocking, deriding, bitching and moaning is a perfectly appropriate response to an idiot company acting in stupid ways.
More people need to get uppity. Sitting quietly at your desk doing exactly what you are told isn't going to get you anywhere.
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Informative)
If we accept the claims made in the article, Adaptec won't even release the technical information necessary for people to write their own. That's what the argument is about.
Actually, nobody seems to expect that. Unquestionably a fair number of people would be happy if it happened, but nobody expects it. What people do expect is for Adaptec to release comprehensive technical specifications for their cards to interested parties, a practice that used to be commonplace among hardware makers but has been in lamentable decline for some time now. Releasing the tech specs would benefit not only OpenBSD developers but Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, and others, and while your assertion is correct that Windows has a >90% market share on the desktop, it's somewhat of a non-sequitur considering we're talking about drivers for a RAID controller that's more likely to go into a server machine. Windows still dominates in that market, as well, but not to the extent that it does on the desktop. By releasing the necessary specs and letting the open source community write drivers that work with their hardware Adaptec could, at very little cost to themselves, expand their potential customer base by 10-20%. Why won't they?
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I was Adaptec I'd realize that most people who buy RAID hardware are not planning to run a desktop computer with Windows. They're likely planning to run some sort of server, which I'm sure have much more than 5% of users running a non-windows OS.
According to Netcraft, there are nearly 2500000 sites hosted on FreeBSD (source [netcraft.com]). This number does not include sites hosted on NBSD and OBSD (obviously).
"Everyone on here expects companies to spend millions in development and bend over backwards for their own purposes."
This wouldn't be millions in development. It would take one guy 10 minutes to e-mail the hardware specs (which they'd have to have available somewhere for them to have written their own driver) to the OpenBSD team and be done with it.
"Adaptec isn't interested in OpenBSD because it's not in their best financial interest, despite their best intentions."
Look at it this way, if you were a stockholder in Adaptec and were told millions of potential customers would not be able purchase your hardware because the company refused to release the specs for it, how would you feel?
ND
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps at this point I should quote part of Doug Anderson's reply?
Some choice quotes:
You say "We have to be realistic here and realize that we have to make it worth it for companies like Adaptec to support Linux or in this case, OpenBSD. Adaptec isn't interested in OpenBSD because it's not in their best financial interest, despite their best intentions." Well, from their email:
Why not? They aren't looking for specific support for ONE operating system. They are looking for documentation that explains how the hardware ticks. This has nothing to do with operating specific information: the operating system DEVELOPERS will work this out THEMSELVES, they don't want an Adaptec supplied driver!!! I would suggest that, by Adaptec's own admission if "you [OpenBSD] as well as many other flavors of Linux/Unix are looking for the same thing" then the OpenBSD project is not the only one having issues with Adaptec documentation and that the Theo has been the one to make the biggest stink about it so far.
Then we get this:
"We are coming out with an entire new rev of our firmware with the upcoming SAS/SATA-2 release in the July timeframe, and our plan is to provide a Software Development Kit (SDK), which will be generic in nature, and will have the documentation in hand that will help you to do the work on your side to continue to expand the support for Adaptec
products in your OpenBSD OS...."
So what?!? Are they saying that to get existing hardware working they have to wait till July AND OpenBSD users will have to update their existing firmware? What sort of response is this??? What's wrong with providing documentation for the existing hardware?
Which leads me to an interesting point. You say that "Everyone on here expects companies to spend millions in development and bend over backwards for their own purposes.", which is correct. If companies spend millions in development, they spend it because they want their customers and potential customers to get the most benefit from their products, and thus keep buying from them. That a company would spend millions on development and then drag the chain on documentation is, to put it frankly, pathetic and more than a little stupid.
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Interesting)
- "write drivers for the niche 5% MacOS X or 5% other *nix market?
What you fail to take into account is that Adaptec RAID 5 controllers are a niche market meant for either hardcore users who need a RAID 5 array for storage, or for servers. To take an entire segment out of that niche and say "We don't want this business" is ludicrous.Last time I checked, OpenBSD is a decent sized segment of the server "niche market." Yes, it is a niche within a niche, but the PR implications of NOT providing documentation is huge, thanks to Slashdot.
This is what the topic is about -- the documentation requested is required to hotswap a failed drive, then rebuilt the array without needing to go into the BIOS and reboot. From what I read, other operating systems (ie: Windows) drivers have the ability to rebuilt the array without a reboot -- this is a huge feature required for many corporate and enterprise class servers.
I choose to vote for Open Source friendly companies with my dollars, and the influence I have on the dollars that my company will spend.
As I'm sure other people have rebutted, all they want is documentation -- Adaptec has a choice, they can choose either paying some $50 shipping and printing out a box of papers, or potentially a huge PR smear that would convince more than a few people to not buy their products.
End rant.
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds to me like the OBSD guys said, "the drivers we've reverse-engineered aren't very stable, and we want more documentation so that we can make them stable for our existing users (of your hardware). If you won't give us that information, or persist in pretending to misunderstand what we want, then we will be unable to produce stable drivers for your hardware and we will refuse to release a driver with the instabilities we know of. We're in a hurry because our main coding time is coming up soon, and we've been asking for this for a while."
There is nothing that requires Adaptec to provide the necessary documentation. Nor is there anything which requires the BSD guys to release a driver that they know is buggy.
What I still don't understand is *why* Adaptec persist in refusing to allow a large, talented, motivated group of programmers to write a good driver for their hardware FOR FREE. If xBSD gets a working driver, then the other BSDs, Linux, etc. won't be far behind. Adaptec needs the server market, Unices are strong in the server market, more Unix drivers for Adaptec hardware means more people buying Adaptec hardware to run on free OS's, everybody wins! Except that Adaptec (apparently) won't play nice. How is that Theo de Raadt's fault?
Of course, I'm not within the loop at Adaptec, and so I don't know why they won't release documentation when it's needed. Perhaps they have some blindingly brilliant reasons why they don't want to release the information necessary to write fully functional drivers. What I do know is that it can't be seen from the outside, looking in.
In any case, I've had my share of trouble with Adaptec RAID cards under Windows. I probably wouldn't buy another one anyway.
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Re:Why just OpenBSD? (Score:4, Insightful)
As deservedly highly-rated as both your post and the grandparent posts are, the sentiments expressed are not the norm. There are many Slashdot sycophants who have championed buying nVidia video cards and dependence on nVidia to release the latest version of their binary-only video software.
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There's an old saying (Score:5, Insightful)
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." - Napolean
Re:There's an old saying (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:There's an old saying (Score:5, Funny)
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The Battle with OpenSource (Score:4, Interesting)
"I'll not release my documentation because others business can get all of my secrets and my bugged harware."
I wonder how this will affect Adaptec? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wonder how this will affect Adaptec? (Score:5, Insightful)
The one advantage it does have is security, which is vital for running large scale servers. These servers have reliabilty as a high priority, so RAID is the norm.
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Re:I wonder how this will affect Adaptec? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd rather use software RAID now. Closed source management tools and unreliable software, hardware and firmware are not things I want anywhere fucking near my data storage subsystems.
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Simple solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a note (Score:5, Informative)
I have not been using OpenBSD sice 1999, but hardware support was never its strong point... though what it supported was,like all the BSD's, supported extremely well.
It's a good call, in spirit of BSD. Scott's drivers are exellent and they just need to port those.
Re:Just a note (Score:5, Informative)
The management utility in the FreeBSD ports tree is binary-only. OpenBSD refuse to accept binary only crap, which is why they want this documentation.
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OpenBSD confirms it... (Score:5, Funny)
this is a good solution (Score:5, Insightful)
People say that Theo should stop being so annoying, but the only way shareholders find out is when it gets massively publicised like this.
It worked for the 802.11 drivers. It's worth a shot here.
Probably software raid (Score:5, Interesting)
reminds me of Promise (Score:5, Informative)
Reminds me of Promise's definition of "Linux support" for a card I bought.
In the case of the SX-150 SATA raid card (which has a hardware XOR engine and whatnot), that meant "we have binary drivers for distributions which are several years old".
There is some source. Well, it's a 'wrapped' binary driver, and it's only available from "some guy" in Germany who begged Promise support long enough they gave it to him. You a)cannot compile it into the kernel b)cannot compile it for 2.6 because it simply isn't compatible. I sent numerous emails to Promise asking when a 2.6 driver would be available or if there was any updated source code. None were ever answered.
Same story with the tools- unless you're running Redhat 9.0 or some ancient version of Suse, forget ANY on-line monitoring.
Not that the customers are much better- one page I found about the card suggested that "software raid is faster anyway", which is an absurd proposition by itself. Regardless, why would you spend $100-200 more on a hardware-raid card complete with cache memory, and then just use the 2.6 SATA driver which only drives the SATA interfaces?
From what I understand, 3ware has better support for Linux, but that means I have to migrate a large amount of data off the old array..
Re:reminds me of Promise (Score:5, Informative)
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Nothing ever changes at Adaptec (Score:5, Interesting)
Substitute "They" for "We" in that sentence and it could have been me speaking, when I was working at Adaptec and trying to release an in-house version of the starfire (a.k.a. "Duralan" ethernet MAC) driver. I hit that same brick wall over and over again while tying to get some chip specs and a linux driver released. Somehow, in their minds, "support" is translated into not releasing specs and drivers. Releasing such information, in contrast, is a failure to support customers. This wierd Orwellian doublethink seems to pervade the thinking of everyone connected with supporting Linux and other free OS's at Adaptec.
It's so amazing to see that nothing has changed at Adaptec in the last 7 years. My own driver episode was "resolved" (unsatisfactorily, for me) by Donald Becker agreeing to sign an NDA for the chip specs. Not to second guess Donald, but my thinking at the time was, "this just postpones the problem. Maybe it would be better just to boycott these imbeciles."
Not to close on a sour note, I should say that Adaptec was a great place to work in many ways, and I always viewed their attitude toward free software as an aberration. I still tend to do so, and perhaps that's wishful thinking on my part.
Threshold of complexity (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the small and medium end raid market now. Theres not many players, Adaptec,promise,3ware and a bunch that adaptec bought up. Adaptec gains nothing by opening up itself to a point by point comparison with lesser competitors. Their name recognition is carrying them much the way IBM's used to. Further if the hardware is bugged and tricky and adaptec knew about it then they open themselves up to liability.
Their reasons are obvious keep the barriers high and keept those that can't climb them out.
LSI (Score:4, Interesting)
(OK, so not directly related to Adaptec - but it seems to be a reasonable place to give their competitor a pat on the back!).
theo rocks (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh well
interesting if not down right funny thread: (Score:5, Interesting)
* Subject: Re: Adaptec AAC raid support
* From: Bob Beck
* Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 13:56:41 -0700
* Cc: Theo de Raadt , Sean Hafeez , misc@openbsd.org, Scott Long , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
* In-reply-to:
* Mail-followup-to: Charles Swiger , Theo de Raadt , Sean Hafeez , misc@openbsd.org, Scott Long , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
* References:
* User-agent: Mutt/1.5.6i
>
> sort of ultimatum is a childish and self-destructive action. I hope
> the other OpenBSD committers veto any such action as being
> counterproductive and harmful to your users.
Horsecookies. What was done was remove AAC support from GENERIC,
because users know what is in GENERIC is supposed to be stable and a
good candidate for use. I've got AAC's. They aren't at the moment.
they die, and you can't do anything with the raid management without
rebooting, and Adaptec has shown no signs of releasing documentation
so that situation can be corrected.
Sure, there's a "free" driver, and a non-free management interface,
so it's only half a driver. Pretending to have a production system
using a raid card that with no supportable management interface so you
have to reboot to fix anything is like buying birth control pills in
packs of 20. Pretty soon you're going to take a good fucking on a day
you really can't afford it. Period.
As such AAC isnt' any more broken than it ever was. OpenBSD
just chooses not to encourage users to purchase a non-supportable
card by including support for it in the GENERIC kernel. Are you
saying it's more honest to leave unstable and incomplete support in
there? People who wish to use it anyway can always compile it in.
> Otherwise, you're likely to discover that most people choose to run an
> OS which works with the hardware they have, rather than sticking with
> OpenBSD.
Or choose to replace the hardware that isn't supportable by the
OS they want to run. Thank you LSI and Dell. LSI cards seem to work
fine.
-Bob
emphasis added by poster
Re:interesting if not down right funny thread: (Score:4, Funny)
Didn't he mean "NO Period?"
RW
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Slightly FUD (Score:4, Informative)
What the Adaptec guy actually said was:Using the word "buggy" like it was used in the Slashdot front page article implies that the cards are flaky and that non-Adaptec cards aren't (as) buggy. This isn't outright stated, but similarly saying something like "I don't use Microsoft Office because it is buggy" tends to leave the listener with the impression that other office suites are less buggy, even though that isn't stated outright.
The Adaptec employee stated only what we already know--that different revisions of firmware have different bugs (in ALL products that use firmware, not just Adaptec RAID adapters), and that they must be worked around. If different revisions of firmware didn't have bugs, then different revisions of firmware wouldn't exist--the first one would have worked fine (aside from occasional feature additions and tweaks).
However, to the original poster's credit, Adaptec RAID cards really do suck, and they really are buggy (not to mention slow, especially in RAID 5, compared to almost every other brand--and Adaptec's entire SCSI line is pretty consistant in that regard), but that is beside the point. Slashdot shouldn't participate in the same FUD that we so often criticize--just let the facts speak for themselves, and leave the interpretation up to the reader.
rule of thumb (Score:5, Insightful)
As a rule of thumb, if you are buying a piece of hardware, buy one for which known, good, independently-developed open source drivers exist. The existence of such drivers is a good indication that the hardware is well-documented, probably decently designed, and that it probably does what it is advertised as doing. And that's a good rule of thumb even if you are buying the hardware that you only intend to use with closed-source operating systems.
Re:How many people... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How many people... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of cause what really annoys me is that the Linux developers seem to care even less. Why is it that the developers of free software can't stand togther and demand documentation? And why is it that it's the smallest team that must make these demands?
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Re:How many people... (Score:5, Informative)
It did not start with BSD4.4-lite, go to 386BSD, move to NetBSD, then OpenBSD, then DragonFlyBSD and then FreeBSD. Each are their own system which split at one time or another from the same tree.
All four of those systems are maintained today and therefore it is not like Windows 9x complaining about hardware support. Windows does not maintain new versions of Windows 95.
OpenBSD is the extremely secure and extremely open of the BSDs and Unix-likes. OpenBSD refuses to have anything that isn't as Free and Open as their goals describe into their system. Linux and FreeBSD are more into the functionality over ideals idea. NetBSD I cannot speak for though as I don't really follow them.
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Re:How many people... (Score:4, Interesting)
Theo is a belligerent prick so he gets noticed more than the others, but every open source OS has identical problems with driver support. Why do you think Theo got that award when he and Stallman don't exactly see eye-to-eye?
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Me (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't used OpenBSD in a few years and was really impressed with their rewrite of packet filter. You linux folks should check it out.
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Re:Tried e-mailing the guy.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Tried e-mailing the guy.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not wrong. Is it just me, or does this de Raadt character get 'snippy' each and every time the world doesn't roll over and play the game how he wants them to?
An important point in a geek's career is the time when s/he recognises that if s/he's gonna get any further in said career, they're gonna have to maintain a business-benefiting attitude and act in business-benefiting ways else businesses won't employ you any more. Sheer guru-like skill only carries you so far, and then you've gotta play nice with others or others won't play with you anymore.
Some geeks come to that realisation early in their careers. I try to tell my geek.students that before they graduate. Some geeks never ever wake up, and they grow old on low incomes angry at the world.
de Raadt does some wonderful things, sure, but there's always this persistent undertone of a bad attitude waiting to sneak out and throw his weight around. Public nastygrams and "screw you, we'll ship with even less support for your product than we did before" dummy spits constitute "does not play nice with others" in my book.
Trouble is, geeks carry no weight in business, and the businessfolks have all the money. It's up to us to decide if we want some of that money or not.
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Re:Tried e-mailing the guy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Tried e-mailing the guy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Jeez, he just wants documentation. Why is this such a problem for people to understand? It's not about how much money he could be making if he had a better set of kneepads, or if he let Adaptec shine him on because that's the way "the game" is played. It's about being able to do what he wants with the hardware he (or the other users of OpenBSD) use. It costs nothing or next-to-nothing for Adaptec to provide the same documentation that their own developers use, yet apparently Adaptec doesn't wants to keep this secret because it might be embarrassing.
Perhaps you think it's a good idea to keep this information secret because the embarrassing aspects of the docs might get in the way of some of Adaptec's employees' desire to play the game and exercise their ability to go for "some of that money". Or perhaps not; maybe there's another reason not to allow serious and qualified developers access to existing documentation. Theo just wants to write software that people will use and will use as a reason to purchase more Adaptec products. I'm shocked that you would actually teach students that this is a bad idea.
Then again, having a problem with the way someone conducts themselves is no reason to disregard their innocuous requests. The money is not always right.
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Re:Tried e-mailing the guy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not wrong. Is it just me, or does this de Raadt character get 'snippy' each and every time the world doesn't roll over and play the game how he wants them to?
There's quite some distance between demanding immediate obedience and 4 months of delays and excuses. Most businessmen don't stand for that either (or they go out of business).
An important point in a geek's career is the time when s/he recognises that if s/he's gonna get any further in said career, they're gonna have to maintain a business-benefiting attitude and act in business-benefiting ways else businesses won't employ you any more.
'Business benefiting attitude' does not mean sycophant or pushover. It means acting in the best interests of a company, sometimes whether they like it or not. Fact is, a lot of assholes succeed in business, mostly because they know how, to whom, and when to be assholes. A trained asshole is a powerful weapon.
Trouble is, geeks carry no weight in business, and the businessfolks have all the money. It's up to us to decide if we want some of that money or not.
Bullshit. How many CEOs of the Fortune 500 are MBAs and how many are technical people that learned business? You're confusing 'engineer' with 'asocial dweeb who lives in his parents' basement'.
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Re:Tried e-mailing the guy.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but that doesnt mean he's always wrong. Its probably best to judge him on what he's saying *at the moment*. Being argumentative is not nesseserily a bad thing, although he does put his foot in it more than is really a good idea
Thats not really true. I'm a geek and i have quite a lot of say in technical decisions. Our CTO is a geek also. I do not work for a technical company. I work for a publishing company.
If any company hires a technically minded person and then wont listen to his or her advice, they they they are wasting that person.
Would you hire an accountant and then ignore their advice about financial matters? if so, please tell me the company you are involved with so I can avoid accidentally getting hired there.
Any company that ignores the advice of its geeks is wasting a valuable resource. The companies I have worked for realise this.
That doesnt mean they are always right, however moderating conflicting advice is part of being a manager.
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Re:Tried e-mailing the guy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How many people... (Score:4, Informative)
The only exception is firmware binary blobs (which all OSes need, as it is not practical to create open source replacements), they are tolerated if they are released under a license that allows OpenBSD to distribute them.
That's similar to what Linuxes like Debian demand, and that's a lot more than Linuxes like Red Hat and Suse demand.
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