My first specification request
Robert Schuster
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Tuesday 23 January 2007
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Today I sent this to O2Micro. I hope it goes well and everyone wins soon.
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Dear O2Micro staff,
I hereby ask for access to the specification for an O2Micro-made device which identifies itself
as "O2 Micro, Inc. OZ711Mx 4-in-1 MemoryCardBus Accelerator" (Vendor:Device = 1217:7110).
This device is built into the laptop I am using. It is a 4-in-1 card reader which I would like
to use to access MMC/SD card with. However currently there is no driver for this device in my
GNU/Linux-based operating system.
As a programmer, I recently started exploring Linux kernel device driver development. If I had
access to the card reader's specification I would be able to write one. However it is important that such information would be publicly accessable because other developers should be able to detect flaws in the implementation, spot point of insufficient performance or simply update
it to new driver APIs. Finally there are other operating system kernels like Solaris, FreeBSD etc. whose developers surely want to write a driver, too.
The Linux kernel is a very successful free software project. It runs on miniature computers, PDAs, desktops, as well as on large cluster systems. Recently the Linux kernel was chosen as the basis for a computer system which is going to distributed to millions of children in the third world[0].
Whether a system or device is supported by Linux is nowadays not a question of technical feasability but of the manufacturing company's policy. I hope that O2Micro is friendly towards the free software
movement and politely ask them to publish the specification for the above mentioned device.
Sincerely Yours
Robert Schuster
(FSFE fellow, GNU Classpath developer, GNU/Linux user, ...)
[0] - http://www.laptog.org
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What do you think? Convincing? Politely enough?
(Btw: Just copy and paste the text I you want to do similar requests. :-) )
This document is in public domain
