the main driver request of the community was to have Wifi driver (according to a poll). This is why Pavel's offer may be tempting.
Network/Wifi BSD driver port.
Hi Martin,
Although you're talking mostly about wireless network support (and I understand
why), I would like to clearly outline to the community, you and everyone, that accepting Pasha's proposal would also kickstart the whole BSD drivers porting thing, because the main wrapper subsystem would be written and debugged. Then not only NIC drivers, but
other hardware class drivers like
video, audio, usb 3, etc, may be ported.
A small digression. You talk about open discussions, and you say that you want the information about proposals to be open to the community, so I think it is okay for me to publish and talk about this.As I have already said, the main wrapper subsystem should be ready first. It is obvious that it should be debugged on some real task, i. e. make some BSD driver interoperate with OS/2 subsystems, which means that an "interface" from the BSD driver to them should be created. And the only Pasha's condition is that the first such an "interface" must be the NIC drivers one. For whatever reason. So in the first stage you pay some initial amount of money and you get a
working wrapper subsystem with
some amount of working NIC drivers.
And then we have options.
The amount of money collected by the Fund is enough to complete another task (which costs less than the first one, because the "main wrapper" is ready already):
- Wi-Fi, OR
- Videodrivers (ATI and NVidia).
So the community, I think, has the right to decide porting which types of drivers the Fund's money should be spent on.
(I have some preferences on this question, but I won't vote (cuz I have no moral right I'm sure, cuz I have never donated a cent to the Fund.))I'm writing this just to outline that there's another option:
the video drivers could be ported instead of wireless NIC (wired NIC drivers must be ported before any of these anyway).
P. S. I just have a feeling that you, Martin, or someone else from OS2World has silently, w/o any public discussion, decided to give the priority to the wlan drivers, while having another option, that could be more interesting to the Community.