On Wednesday, Mar 2001 at 13:55:31 "Scott Franzyshen" wrote:
>
> They are in Business and the only thing they are promoting is their
> profit($).
> It is not a secret that they would prefer you to buy($) their product.

Irrelevant. FSF sells documentation and support, as well as contracts
for feature enhancements. So do many open source development projects.
RedHat sells things as well, and would much prefer it if you bought the
box rather than downloading the install cd. Same with FreeBSD and
many of the other OS distributions. Of course I would rather have
money than not, wouldn't you?

> You can of course hunt and peck your way through the cryptic (UN-DOCUMENTED)
> releases of the driver, but

Although there is very little english documentation, I have found the
code to be very clean and readable, at least compared to many open source
projects...

> do not expect even the slightest of (non-commercial) support. If you are a
> novice .... good luck!

My complaint here is not the lack of support, but the openly hostile
responses I have recieved to my questions. There is no promise of
support for an open source project, but I did not expect to be attacked.
I must say that those were the worst experiences I have had with
any company or opensource project.

> project. Selectively releasing source (in my opinion) is NOT open source.

Selectivly releasing source is very common in many "open source" projects.
In a project I maintain, there have been features and bugs that I have
not released to the public, for users' protection and my own.

> I guess time will tell whether absoval.com will make any more excesses as to
> why they don't (can't) support Ad-Hoc, AP, WEP, etc. Is it really a fear of
> being sued ... or is it that they don't want to risk the edge they have in
> this industry?

AP mode works fine for me and I have been told that Ad-Hoc works fine in
earlier firmware releases. The not releasing WEP in linux-wlan-ng out of
fear of being sued, but linux-wlan having it seems a bit odd. But remember,
a company releasing source like that has a lot more to lose than say,
a college kid.

> I would bet that their $20,000.00 product has FULL documentation, more
> advanced features, oh and lets not forget ... support.

I would hope it does, and there is no reason to hold that against them.
In their commercial endeavour, they have given us a working (for the most
part) driver that seems to be fairly well designed. For that, we should
thank them, not insult them.

Rob
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