On Dec 15, 2005, at 5:10 AM, Olin Lathrop wrote:

> why does everyone have the attitude that this must be done by someone
> else.  Clearly *someone* has to understand and implement this stuff.

Well, at some point you have to decide whether you want to be an
OS and protocol stack developer, or an "application" developer.  For
large companies, it certainly seems to be easier to buy a USB stack
than to spend a couple man years (at $100k+ each) writing one that
then isn't compatible with anything else (at the internal API layer) and
requires each new employee actually LEARN about its idiosyncracies
before they can start using it...  Much easier to advertise "should
be familiar with berkeley tcp using sockets" than "needs to learn
cisco IOS TCP API..." :-(   Then there's the whole testing and
compatability problem; You develop your USB device stack and it works
fine on every OS and machine you have available to try it on, but
somehow doesn't work on the customer's newer model laptop.  grr.
On the one hand, it's nice to understand the code well enough to be
able to attack the problem yourself; on the other hand it sure would
have been nice if the stack had been written by someone with more
testing resources in the first place.  (There's a related "open source"
dilemma.  Sure, you can find and fix bugs yourself.  Theoretically.  But
the number of people actually capable of doing that is much smaller
than the number of people likely to be affected by that bug...)

BillW

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