You are right, OF COURSE.
But it has no value to start a discussion about the hen and the egg.
1-"They" (the chipset manufacturers) do not want to give out the doc.
2-Given that they do not want to give out the doc, they do not want to
spend money to make Linux drivers in addition to Windows drivers which
they bundle with the chipset sale; their sales go by millions of units,
and competition is hard.
3-"They" is not the hardware vendor but the chipset manufacturer who
delivers chipsets to the hardware vendor (please do not start a
discussion of the meaning of hardware vendor, as the question is,
vending to WHOM?).
4-And the problem is NOT with cards or on board integrated circuits
which today mix modem and sound in the same integrated chip, but
with the modem chipset itself, and even only on one of its components in
AC'97 chipsets (the codec).
Do you happen to know WHY the chipset manufacturers do not want to
release the information necessary to write a driver?
Behind this question is the explanation of why some (Lucent Mars series,
SmartLink, and a few more) are willing to write and give out for free
the minimal core code needed to wrap up a modem.
Best regards - Jacques
Paul Vojta wrote:
On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 06:31:05AM -0600, janez.zemva@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Jacques Goldberg writes:
[snip]
Re. Linuxant: why don't the authors of vitriolic calls to boycott xyz,
and more generally of flaming this or that, waste their time writing their
prose rather than writing software to make their modems work?
Because of the steep learning curve. It is easier to write vitriol than
learn something new. Further, the drivers that are available are almost all
based on code supplied by some company at first.
No, it's because of lack of documentation from the hardware vendors.
They don't publish the programming interfaces of their cards, so we *can't*
write drivers for them.
--Paul Vojta, vojta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
