Alexander Leidinger

In multimedia@ we have a discussion about the envy24* chips. One question is how to convince companies to provide some technical information or at least free hardware samples. As part of the answer I pointed to http://www.bsdstats.org/ which may be able to provide some numbers (e.g. envy24* chips without a matching driver) which may help in negotiating some stuff with a company. Unfortunately not many envy24 chips show up there. Part of the problem may be that not enough people run the bsdstats port (and enable periodic reporting of at least the devices).

So do you have any unsupported hardware (not only limited to soundcards) or some hardware which is still up-to-date but lacks some features in the driver (this is at least the case for all recent soundcards like envy24* or HDA based ones)? Fine, run bsdstats and enable the periodic reporting. Maybe we are able to get enough numbers to show to companies so that they think it would be financially beneficial to support us in some way (free hardware, docs, technical hints, whatever).

Oh… while we are at it, the ALSA people added support for some envy24 based cards based upon the reverse engineering effort which was needed to write our driver as it is now. So if you are working for a company and reading this: if you support us, you get the Linux stuff for free too. And as an additional bonus, you can show a working driver without any bad legal strings (e.g. GPL infection) to OEMs. So go and calculate how much sales you can do with embedded stuff and come back to us with some technical hints and/or free hardware (it costs some few bucks for you to provide this: not much if it fails but a large amount of return if it works out).