Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@netbsd.org>  wrote:
 > It's quite silly for vendors to make barriers in writing drivers
 > for their hw. However, it's inevitable fact of life, and we need
 > to live with that. I don't see any problem in signing a NDA as long
 > as the result driver can be opensource. Vendors are generally quite
 > welcoming once the necessary papers are in place.  Behaviour similar
 > to the Intel networking legal department is quite an exception.


I've wanted to stay out of this discussion, largely.  But as a hardware
vendor, I do have something to say.  Our intent when designing our 
PC cards was to be open source with the firmware.  We still want to
do that.  Our lawyers, while interpreting our english desires into
legalese don't quite get what we're after.  Everytime you ask about
a specific clause, they say "oh, that's to protect you from such 
and such", at which point you think to yourself, "wow. never thought
of that. Ok. leave that in there", and eventually you end up with
something that isn't really open-source.  

But the big problem is that, as a small company, we find ourselves
in need of getting some investment money but it's difficult to find
an investor who doesn't see "open source" as a risk to his investment.
Whether it's right or not, it's reality. We need money. We want to do
as little as possible to seem unattractive to that money. Finding an
open source supporter with extra money to spend these days, is, shall
we say, non-trivial. Unless you've started a hardware company on your
own sweat and taken it to millions in revenue without external investment,
feel free not to offer an argument to the above.

So while we publish the interface specification to our card (and that
spec was used by a third party to write a Linux driver), we don't 
currently publish the source to the firmware on our card, as we had
originally intended.  Loonies like Wojciech don't actually understand
how the world works and can always be ignored.  But I thought I'd 
post this to lend some perspective to the rest of you who are 
reasonable thinking people.