[alsa-devel] ESI MAYA44 driver status

[Rene Herman]

On 09/02/2007 10:03 AM, Piotr Makowski wrote:

> Ah, I'm so desperate that I'm even ready to pay the proper programmer.. or
> maybe we could collect some money from people who would like to run their
> maya's on linux... I have done all that I can - written the letter to esi,
> contacted ALSA development team.
> I'm really disappointed. Or... maybe someone is already
> talking with esi about writing those drivers?
> 
> The card is NOT SUPPORTED! Isn't it the top priority for alsa
> programmers?

Well, the thing is -- "ALSA programmers", like most of the time in open 
source, are much less of a coherent entity than they are a collection of 
random individuals doing what they need or want done.

I very much only speak for myself and in the capacity of having done mostly 
just some fairly peripheral ALSA stuff anyway, but the tone of the message 
that Claus posted to the list rather annoyed me. A quote:

http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipermail/alsa-devel/2007-August/002666.html

> 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.

Heh. ESI supporting the ALSA developer community? No, the idea here is that 
the ALSA developer community (for some useful definition of this mythical 
entity) would be supporting ESI's customers.

This offer of support even comes largely free. All the developer needs is 
_something_ to get started, to get far enough to at least know what they 
need to ask of the offered engineering contacts (well, that, and the 
hardware, but a lender will generally do).

Producing this "something" takes some of ESIs resources but it doesn't need 
to be many even for a small company, and what they are getting in return is 
Linux support for their hardware, free for evermore after that initial 
slight cost.

However, next quote:

> Unless we have to do that to achieve something we want to achieve,
> we simply can't do that.

Here we have ESI saying that supporting their customers who'd like to use 
their hardware under Linux is not something they want to achieve.

Which, don't get me wrong, may be perfectly sensible. I myself hear of more 
and more Linux in the (semi-)pro market but that's no doubt partly attention 
skew and I ofcourse do not know about ESI's own view of their customers, 
existing and potential.

But senseability aside, what it does boil down to for me personally is that 
ESI can go <bleep> themselves.

If any of the capable developers had the hardware, things would've probably 
been different since at that point it's also just about scratching personal 
itches but without it's mostly about providing free support for a company 
that just said outright they're not at all interested. Yes, well...

Rene.