Re: [tlug] [ot] paywalls for fixing bugs, was: Sun X4150 BIOS and ILOM update

[Christian Horn <chorn@example.com>]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 02:00:06PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Christian Horn writes:
>  > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 11:41:25PM +0900, Pier Fumagalli wrote:
>  > > 
>  > > [ paywall in front of a firmware that fixes bugs ]
>  > 
>  > This is how far we have come in the world..
>  > What will be next?
> 
> Realistically, companies will use any strategy whose probability of
> being legal passes a certain threshold to extract higher payments, and
> users whose need exceeds the price will pay.  This is fundamentally a
> good thing!

I was also thinking of other companies still having firmware updates
free and "customers beeing able to vote with their feet" and rather
buying those.

But I am reminded of the state of hardware monitoring on Linux.
Correct me if I am wrong, but to my knowledge we still have no good
standard way to see if fans or disks in a system failed.  Some of 
these pieces are covered in smartmon tools for select raids, and in
lmsensors (but finding out your chips is no fun, and scale factors etc.),
or available via ipmi (mostly temperatures).
So in that area no vendor stepped out to suggest a clear interface
and provide the first implementation in his servers.  That could be
a real advantage for the first one to provide.


> If you think the price is unnecessarily high for marginal usage, use
> FLOSS.  (This costs you nothing, since you already do.)  If you care
> about people who don't like that price, teach them to use FLOSS, and
> if they can't (RMS propaganda notwithstanding, not every user need
> causes a developer to itch), help develop software to meet their
> needs.  As long as we're free to do that, does it really make sense to
> bitch about companies that supply software that does things that ours
> can't do?

I think the fact that hardware is driven here by the firmware, and
that hardware is clearly in the hands of the vendor, is taking the
option of developing something own out.
coreboot.org is a good project, but I think the big vendors do not
work together with it.

Just random further thoughts from the area,
Chris