Discferret broken?

I will answer in brief. A proprietary analyzer is not in the best interests of preservation. It instead keeps preservation limited to a small group of "elite" people. This is wrong. If you really were afraid that people would post bad dumps, then you'd be signing official releases. If you have to dongle-protect the analyzer, there has to be some reason for it ? and the only reason I can see is to make money, and keep it out of the hands of people. The bug in the DiscFerret lasted that long because it wasn't really used heavily enough to be detected. After we put it to some use, the bug was found rather quickly. If I had started my testing back in August rather than late December, I'm certain it would have been caught back then. My understanding is that the Catweasel has similar issues. As for software and Linux support: Please make an open, accessible repository containing the source code for DTC, so I can recompile it for various platforms. I often use Linux platforms other than x86 or x86_64. This would help the community greatly. The firmware source code would be useful to people too, I am very certain. "People that want it can contact us. Some did/do. And some use the software as part of a special arrangement. I really don't see why this is wrong." "How should we know you would want to audit it?" Why is this the case? If the project is geared towards preservation, I should not have to jump through hoops to contribute. With many popular open source projects today, people submit pull requests all the time. There's zero hoops to jump through ? clone the project, commit new code, send a request upstream. Works great for the community. Or if not, at least make the USB protocol available. But no, I don't expect any of that from you, since I've seen enough. Though I haven't had 14 years in the industry, I have had several years of working with various open source and preservation related projects to know what's better for the community. I will put all my effort into making the DiscFerret a viable solution for imaging floppy disks, hard drives, and other media. This includes making the software extremely easy to use, and stable. Thank you for your time. I cannot support a project that favors elitism over preservation. --Dave