🚀 go-pugleaf

Remy Lebeau (TeamB) wrote:

>>What I meant is that if we order such development now, we will
>>pay 20K and get the result in 3-4 months. If we developed it
>>ourselves, it would probably cost about $7-8K, but it would take
>>6-8 months.
> Why?

(I am talking about virtual file system driver, which I am interested 
in. it is possible that other types of drivers are less expensive).

Due to complexity of development, and, what is more important, of 
debugging. Drivers are usually written completely in C (no C++) with 
limited stack and heap size. Documentation is limited (DDK describes 
only small part of functions), experience matters much more than with 
desktop development. There are much less people who can share some tip 
in newsgroup or forum.

Those companies that offer custom development services charge 
~200-$300/hr (the one that I talked about charged $50/hr, and this was 
non-US company).

Debugging - any problem and you have to reboot the computer and repeat 
the testing sequence (which can be quite complicated). Debugging is done 
either using MS debug tools (cool command line debugger :) or using some 
kind of logging (I didn't look deeper into this). Kernel of each OS is 
different and it changes from service pack to service pack. You have to 
test the driver with each version of OS, with each service pack etc.


Well, if we had this amount of free resources, we would certaintly try 
to make the driver (it's a very interesting software engineering task), 
but the final question is "who will compensate the cost of development". 
Drivers are the thing that can rarely be reused in some other project, 
and to cover cost of driver development for SolFS we would have to sell 
much more copies of SolFS that we do now :).

-- 
Eugene Mayevski
EldoS Corp., CTO
Security and networking solutions
http://www.eldos.com