Re: free tg3 ethernet driver

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Thu, 9 Oct 2008 22:36:57 +0200
Davi Leal <davi@leals.com> wrote:

> Alan Cox wrote:
> > Well if you want to write new firmware for the device you'll need to
> > reverse engineer the chip internals or convince Broadcom to document them
> > for you. I suspect you'll have to get to the point of xraying the
> > component slice by slice and need a multi-million dollar budget.
> 
> People position seem to be continue to pledge to pay $151 to the developer(s) 
> (even if it's Broadcom in case they apply to the pledge system) who provide a 
> free driver for tg3 devices.

Well thats good, another 1.999849 million dollars and you might get
started.

With the best will in the world if you go and pay Broadcom zillions to
open source the firmware the only incentive you create is for them to
keep future firmware proprietary to sell to you next time around.

If on the other hand you buy non Broadcom equipment if you feel this
way about the firmware then you create a far better economic incentive,
and at $10 a NIC its not really hard to do that.

Alan