[laptop-discuss] Solaris 10 BCM4306 , no WPA?

[James Cornell]

Hi Yiannis,

If you took basic economics you'd find out that there is always  
balance.  Efficiency is key, and it is an understatement to say that  
supporting Broadcom equipment is inefficient.  The lack of proper  
documentation is the problem, just as it has been discussed to death  
with Sun's older SPARC boards and OpenBSD, regarding NDA's and  
availability.  Broadcom is an allusion to the old Sun way of doing  
things.

Supporting equipment without documentation and/OR source (Neither will  
happen in a workable state based on prior dealings) is near  
impossible.  Even with the most talented people working on the issue  
at hand, economically speaking it is exponentially more costly to  
support completely closed hardware, as it requires more developers,  
more man hours, more testing, and a slew of hardware acquisitions for  
the tests for multiple people no less.  A lot of the people involved  
with the actual porting of Broadcom hardware through reverse  
engineering are hired by corporations who can float the labor bill.   
Sun so far is mainly interested with Intel, AMD and NVIDIA as they do  
not like vendors who provide no alternatives.

Broadcom will not deliver binary for Solaris/OpenSolaris WIFI.   
Broadcom will not release specifications even under NDA.  Broadcom  
will not release source.  Broadcom will not support reverse engineered  
drivers or NDIS driven drivers.  Broadcom will not support 64-bit  
computing except through narrow channel OEM dealings.  Broadcom has  
always had bad PR with vendors who support and/or development hardware/ 
software for multiple platforms.

Nothing will change the fact this is impossible to support, I'd  
personally rather have NDIS support worked on than to try and write a  
crippled reverse engineered driver, they are less reliable from my  
experience than NDIS, and I really hate NDIS as it is.

What's 10 bucks?  Well if you live in America that's nothing, with the  
gas prices, the bad economy that no one will admit to, the rising  
inflation, 10 bucks can barely afford you two drinks at Starbucks.   
I'd personally drop Starbucks and opt for brewing my own, as I already  
have, and thus can buy better hardware because I am more efficient.

If you're in a 3rd world country, sorry we have enough problems that  
are mostly not in our control due to a dictatorship of 500 people  
ruling 330 million.

Why are you interested in OpenSolaris anyways?  Did you come from  
Windows upbringing where ignorance is bliss?  There's that balance  
thing again.. OpenSolaris is free and open, and there is no license  
costs anywhere, and most people are used to giving Microsoft just a  
little bit of cash yearly, so I don't see how mooching off of Sun by  
proxy for a great product warrants a non-investment on the recipient's  
end.  You have to invest to reap immediate rewards.

James
On Jun 5, 2008, at 3:26 AM, Yiannis wrote:

> yes this has been discussed to death, but why limit choice with the  
> reasoning that the company is evil? At the end of the day, there is  
> a lot of broadcom based hardware out there, and if linux is going  
> into the trouble of supporting it, why not OpenSolaris? Give support  
> for it, let the users make their own choice and if the hardware is  
> to die out, so be it, but it should not be done through the route  
> you are advocating.
>
>
> This message posted from opensolaris.org
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> laptop-discuss at opensolaris.org

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