On the surface the question is very rediculous. Hardware vendors make
hardware. They make a driver to make the hardware work. The driver needs
the hardware. The hardware needs the driver. You publish your driver and
sell the hardware. Everybody's happy. (though see below for a story about
an exception to this rule)
Now since your profit is tied to the hardware you could give away specs
since anybody who is using the specs will need the hardware anyway.
The claims about not-releasing the specs are usually not founded. The
reason is that if your company has money (and interest) you can have the
necessary hardware needed to monitor bus access and whatever is necessary
to find out what data is written where. There are debugging versions of
windows available, so for people with money and desire to know your ports
it's not a problem.
But there is a case when copying the driver is an essential part of the
hardware. This is when you don't actually have the hardware. When your
modem/sound card/video card is done entirely(or for most part) in
software.
Now I can see at least one company with big interest in this : Intel.
Intel wants to sell more processors. Expensive processors. But who in the
office wants 400mhz cpu if you don't see the difference between K6-233 or
Pentium ? You see the difference if buying more expensive Pentium gets you
a cheaper computer. If all the devices are emulated in cpu. In fact I
recall a cnet report that was saying specifically that this is Intel's
strategy for the next few years - trying to sell more cpu's by offloading
task on the processor. This is not a bad thing by itself. It just didn't
work well so far.
So my point is that UDI is not about making more drivers for Unix. Or
better drivers. At least not in the first place. UDI is about making
money. Intel (and others) want to shape the market. Oh, it may turn out
that there is no market in this. That UDI didn't work. But, a big company
can dedicate a little of their resources to such project. In view of the
dollars they can make it is allright.
Another point. For a software device to work it often needs a dedicated
share of cpu time. One of problems all winmodems had is that they dropped
connections as soon as you started anything cpu intensive.
Now in the list of OS below which ones are better at doing RT and non RT
simultaneosly ?
List: Linux, Solaris, Windows 95, Windows NT, SCO, Hp, Qnx,AIX add
another here..
I don't know about Qnx (how well is it at non-RT stuff ?), but Solaris,
W95, WNT are not RT.
I don't have an opinion so far whether UDI is good or bad.UDI is about
creating a new market. On one hand it's great. More stuff cheaper. On the
other hand there were quite a few occasions when making money standed in
the way of science and fun, and well, I don't know about you, but I don't
like that.
Vladimir Dergachev
PS Story as promised:
A friend of mine bought a Umax Astra 600S scanner, because, well, scanner
is a useful thing and this particular scanner was relatively cheap - $100+
something. Now if you noticed he bought a scsi scanner since his printer
port was used by a printer. I was helping to install it. The scsi card in
the computer was SIIG something.
When I tried to install the drivers that came with the scanner they
didn't work. (OS=Windows 95). Turned out that the drivers don't work with
any SCSI card, just a few selected once - the one that came with the
scanner and the Adaptec.
I searched on the web for an alternate driver and after a couple of hours
downloaded several drivers from other vendors which used similar chips.
The driver from Corel worked. Unfortunately one couldn't scan above
300dpi and/or in color, but it was fine for greyscale stuff.
A year after he got another computer. I tried to install the scanner
using the scsi card that came with it. Can you guess ? The drivers didn't
work at all. If you notice the SANE driver for the same scanner cannot
scan better than the Corel driver as well. So I think it's a hardware bug.
Bottomline: A driver from a different vendor worked better than from a
manufacturer. If the people who made it released the specs there would be
a Linux driver which would work better then commercial ones.
In spite of existence of UDI-like scanner interface for windows 95.
(TWAIN - specifies an interface for the driver) mixing different hardware
is pretty hard. Of course, UDI might (should) be better than TWAIN.
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