Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on October 28, 2003 08:15 AM
What the government and everyone else should be insisting on is that CD and DVD ATAPI devices conform to the SCSI MMC standard.
It sounds to me like LG Electronics invented their own command for downloading firmware instead of using (or at least not overloading) the commands defined in the MMC standard.
One of the nice things about having the MMC standard is that testing against it goes a long way towards ensuring a device will work with any OS and driver combination, present or future.
Laws requiring OSS compliance are bound to be shot down in court, if they have a chance of passing at all. For just one example, it could be argued that requiring vendors to test against all existing OSes would be an unfair burden. To require testing against a subset of OSes would be giving unfair competitive advantage to those OSes.
Instead we should be insisting that the government gives preference to software and hardware that complies with open standards when those standards exist (and by open, I also mean unencumbered by non-free patents, copyrights, etc.)
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Re:Non OSS compliant Hardware in E-Government
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on October 28, 2003 08:15 AMIt sounds to me like LG Electronics invented their own command for downloading firmware instead of using (or at least not overloading) the commands defined in the MMC standard.
One of the nice things about having the MMC standard is that testing against it goes a long way towards ensuring a device will work with any OS and driver combination, present or future.
Laws requiring OSS compliance are bound to be shot down in court, if they have a chance of passing at all. For just one example, it could be argued that requiring vendors to test against all existing OSes would be an unfair burden. To require testing against a subset of OSes would be giving unfair competitive advantage to those OSes.
Instead we should be insisting that the government gives preference to software and hardware that complies with open standards when those standards exist (and by open, I also mean unencumbered by non-free patents, copyrights, etc.)
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