Hi James,

please let me say first that I am not intending this as any personal comment as I am pretty sure you are not the only person with similar thoughts about the discussion.

Yet, I have to say that it is exactly the somewhat ignorant attitude that turns us and quite a number of other vendors "off" in supporting the ALSA developer community better. It is what I have refered to in my email to Piotr that he cut & pasted to this mailing list (without asking for permission btw.). I have been following the developments at ALSA since many years now and worked with a number of different developers for different products to get them working properly. Many of our products are supported just fine under ALSA and both the developers and the users seemed to appreciate that fact. Unfortunatly your comments show your obvious lack of understanding about how some companies are working in this industry and what sort of approach is needed by you guys to get better support from us. This is why I used the term "culture crash" in my email.

So, basically, ESI cannot help us. I am amazed that they can write any sort of driver without some sort of datasheet.

Well ... frankly, it should not be your concern on how we are developing drivers for our hardware designs (which are ours). What you wrote is a cheap comment and I do not see how it could be an appropriate comment if you look at everything what I wrote and not just the introduction. The way (format, style and most important in our case: language) we store our internal company data is no ones concern except mine and the concern of my employees.

We are not developing our products with the purpose to share this information with others. It is not part of our business model. We are not a chipset vendor and we are not making designs that other companies are supposed to use or work with. Our data is used inside our company and nowhere else. Every document that goes out to the public must go through a process that is aprooved by a number of people, written by the actual responsible person, in our case partially even translated into another language by someone who is not an expert on the issue and only then could be sent out. Unless we have to do that to achieve something we want to achieve, we simply can't do that. This might be different with other companies you've been in contact with (I saw you developed major parts of the drivers for various Creative devices and can probably guess that this is where main parts of your experience come from) where there are more people available that could get and go through such tasks. I could now add information about company and market sizes, etc. but that would make everything only more complicated (that's the type of discussion that is nice in combination with a few beers in a pub at some late evening ...).

What I did in the introduction of my email to Piotr was to mention this fact about our situation without going into any details. I am probably saying more about how our company works than what many other vendors ever would disclose about themselve. I hoped it would help to improve the understanding of "the other side". Your comments are disapointing and puzzle me a little bit, but unfortunatly I have to say that I have expected something like this from my past experience. Luckily not all ALSA contributors / developers share your views as the fact that many of our products (as well as quite a number of products from other vendors) are supported in ALSA at this moment without having the document (you think) you need, speaks for itself I might add.

But I do know it does happen, because I have received datasheets that were only written years after a particular sound card was first sold. I would like to stress, that the datasheet does not have to be perfect. We would be quite happy if it has spelling mistakes in, and some wrongly labeled registers. I have received datasheets from other manufactures where some engineer has just scribbled some notes on the back of a piece of paper.

At least you acknowledge that this happens which I think is quite positive. I am not saying that what you mention here resembles what goes on in our company, but it is not that far from the actual situation. If you add that our engineers are in Korea and make their notes mostly in Korea, you get a little bit closer to the real picture. Of course we have documents but they are not ready in any way that I would approove sending them out to the public.

Now, if ESI cannot even provide this, we should highlight ESI in RED in the sound card matrix.

As you can guess, it was this sentence that prompted me to reply directly to the list. In my opinion, your comment is unfair and simply ignoring major parts of what I wrote in my mail to Piotr. I have shown a certain level of commitment and your response basically tells me that you are not even interested ... if more people would share your views, ALSA would have made no development at all in the last 5 years I guess.

Our engineers are all happy to answer questions and provide assistance and help if required. As I said, we are happy to be in contact with an individual developer who is actually doing the development. It is a lot less time consuming and for us a lot more simple (actually, I believe it is more simple for the developer on the ALSA end as well but I realize some people might disagree here).

I'm sorry if this long mail has distracted a few people from the daily discussion about fixing bugs and improving code, but I am sure there are enough people that understand where I am coming from and what I wrote here. I do not want to start a long discussion here, so I also do not intend to comment on the whole issue further on the mailing list. Contact me directly and we can go from there (as I mentioned in my mail to Piotr).

Best regards,

Claus Riethmueller Managing Director ESI Audiotechnik GmbH