Yes, it's notoriously difficult to find who actually makes the hardware for these devices! let alone who writes the firmware. Many cameras are much too hard to

Yes, it's notoriously difficult to find who actually makes the hardware for these devices! let alone who writes the firmware. Many cameras are much too hard to reverse engineer in order to run your own firmware. Fwiw, I recall that this is exactly how Dropcam started: they reverse-engineered the firmware for (iirc) an Axis net cam, then provided their own.