[FSF India] Re : Lessons from Mexican school experiment

[Ramakrishnan M]

Vivekananda Prabhu wrote:
> 
> 1) Publish a complete list of peripherals for which
> Free drivers are available & can be got from Assembled
> PC makers in India. This list ideally should be

Free Driver is again a confusing term. What we need is hardware with Free Specs
(i.e Specs freely available for everyone). Some companies gives sourcecode for
their hardware, but don't publish the specs, this is as good as binary only
drivers, as the company can publish the code, which makes use of only some
portion of the hardware with minimum functionality. 

Examples: 

a. Creative publishes source code for SB Live cards which has EMU10k1 DSPs, no
one knows the instruction set of the DSP, and hence its capabilities. (they
give a brain damaged assembler with their "Open Source" drivers, but they are
just that : brain damaged and half baked. We don't want such things. 

"Give us the information about your chip, we will write the drivers"

b. Matrox published the source code and specs for most of their G100/200/4xx
series, but didn't publish the specs+code for some of the internal ROM code,
which differentiates their chip from others. 


-- 
Ramakrishnan M                | email: <rkrishnan@ti.com>  
Texas Instruments R&D Center  | Ph: +91-80-5099132 (Office)
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