There oughta be a page somewhere on "How to Sell your Product in the Linux
Market".
On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Dave Rattay [ITeX] wrote:
> I definitely agree that our worlds do not match. While I would hate
> to lose any customers there are some things that can not be avoided.
> There are many things to be taken into consideration when we make our
> drivers. One the vast majority of our customers use Windows and
> therefore we must devote most of our time there.
Understood.
> Second when a new OS
> comes out from Microsoft (such as XP) we are given beta copies 6 months
> in advance so that our drivers hit the market along side the new OS
> release. This just doesn't happen with Linux.
Sure it does. It happens right here on LKML and some other lists. You
can get early-release images of Linux 2.5 right now. The distribution
builders won't pick up 2.5 for many months.
> I agree that this would
> be much simpler if the source code was released and we had "help" in
> driver development but as I said that just can't happen, end of story.
> Now as to specs for the board itself you can check with sales because I
> am not even sure what our policy is on that and I wish you luck in those
> regards.
Board spec.s are largely irrelevant. It's *chip* spec.s that driver
writers need most. There's no such thing as board drivers for Linux, but
there are a number of chipset drivers. For example, under Windows there's
a separate driver for each company's NE2000 clone, but under Linux the ne
driver handles them all. Board-level differences are usually dismissed as
"quirks", if they are significant at all.
(Stores need to understand this too. A lot of sales have gone to one
rather than another because store B told me what chipset was used in a
board-level product, and store A would not.)
-- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@IUPUI.Edu Our lives are forever changed. But *that* is exactly as it always was.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Feb 23 2002 - 21:00:50 EST