OpenBSD Clashes with Adaptec In Quest for Docs

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."

Comments

Why just OpenBSD?

[Dacmot]

It would be nice if more of the Linux big names would jump on the bangwagon and lobby with companies to get open source drivers for hardware.

There's an old saying

[deanj]

There's an old saying, which I think fits well here.

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." - Napolean

Re:There's an old saying

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically you've misunderstood irony...

I wonder how this will affect Adaptec?

[kae_verens]

I know that when I'm buying hardware, I first make sure that there's at least a reasonable chance that it will work in my operating system (Linux, by choice). So, in this case, if I was choosing a RAID card, and my system was BSD-based, then Adaptec would be down a few quid.

Why just documentation?

[Penguinoflight]

Absolutely. Open source drivers would be a beautiful gift, in this case it's actually more than what is being asked for. Adaptec is asked to release specs on their raid controllers, they chose not to.

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.

Re:Why just documentation?

[0racle]

They are under an obligation to provide usefulness on legit architectures

Exactly what obligation does Adaptec have?

Re:Why just documentation?

[Anonymous Coward]

None. Just as I have no obligation to ever buy an Adaptec piece of hardware again.

Re:Why just documentation?

[Gid1]

That's not a "responsibility" or an "obligation". It is, however, an incentive, and should be quite a strong one at that.

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.

Re:Why just documentation?

[McNally]

What customers exactly? If you were Adaptec, would you write drivers for your hardware in Windows, a platform you're programmers are very experienced with and caters to the 90% marketshare, or write drivers for the niche 5% MacOS X or 5% other *nix market?

A re-read of the article might be in order, along with a scan of the other responses. I haven't yet run into a post demanding that Adaptec develop and release open-source OpenBSD (or Linux, or MacOS, or whatever you please) drivers for its hardware -- that's not what we're talking about at all.

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.

Everyone on here expects companies to spend millions in development and bend over backwards for their own purposes. 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.

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?

Re:Why just documentation?

[NuclearDog]

"If you were Adaptec, would you write drivers for your hardware in Windows, a platform you're programmers are very experienced with and caters to the 90% marketshare, or write drivers for the niche 5% MacOS X or 5% other *nix market?"

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). 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

Re:Why just documentation?

[killjoe]

"Its their decision and people shouldn't begin to whine when they don't get their way."

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.

Simple solution...

[Hans Lehmann]

There's a very simple solution for this: Don't buy anything from Adaptec, ever. They'll be out of business; problem solved.

Just a note

[FullMetalAlchemist]

Just a note; the "former Adaptec employee" is Scott Long of the FreeBSD project.

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.

OpenBSD confirms it...

[Mr. Flibble]

OpenBSD confirms it... Adaptec is dying!

Probably software raid

[metaverse]

Like their old AAA ide raid controllers which was nothing more than IDE paddle boards with software raid logic..marketed as true hardware raid.. Documentation exposes the magic behind the illusion..(sometimes)

Re:Tried e-mailing the guy....

[cgenman]

Well, you see, they had been trying to switch over to BSD, they they had this driver problem...

Re:reminds me of Promise

[ultima]

Software RAID *is* very often faster, especially on a modern CPU paired with an older design -- you don't buy HW RAID because it is faster, you buy it for battery backup and offloading of low level operations to conserve CPU time and bus/memory bandwidth for user applications and so that if your OS or CPU/memory/whatever blows up, or you lose power, it won't corrupt the data on your disk array. Hardware RAID dedicated processors are simple, slow, "reliable" units -- not ultra-fast bleeding-edge dedicated units like you see on video cards.

Nothing ever changes at Adaptec

[Anonymous Coward]

Theo says: "We are not asking for support. We are asking for documentation."

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

[Crashmarik]

Why adaptec isnt releasing detailed specs is obvious. If people had them they could better evaluate the product. Apparently the marketing dept. at adaptec fears transparency and complacency.

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.

Re:Tried e-mailing the guy....

[Ed Avis]

"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.

This is not incompatible with 'a business-benefiting attitude' and 'acting in business-benefiting ways'. William Gates Jr has built a very successful business by acting exactly in this manner. If you think geeks have a bad attitude and businessmen do not, perhaps it's just because geeks publish their nastygram messages on the web and businesses keep them secret.

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.

I think you have an incorrect assumption here. Theo de Raadt is not trying to get money. He is trying to improve a free operating system, OpenBSD.