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Because that would make them expensive. The cost of those boards isn't in the hardware, it's in the people writing software and the QA that comes with it.
by oneplane 8y ago
Because that would make them expensive. The cost of those boards isn't in the hardware, it's in the people writing software and the QA that comes with it.
- emilfihlman 8y agoThat's not the case. You must anyways be able to support them to get anything done so the software things already exist. It's just that they don't bother with sharing those docs in English since it's Asia only pretty much.
- oneplane 8y agoNo, that's not how it works. Doing proper support means getting your code mainlined and written and tested according to the rules. Doing a dirty port with crappy code that still runs is easy and cheap. Delivering a crap fork and not updating it a year after release is common because of this, same goes for a lot of commercial stuff.
- candiodari 8y agoThat depends on your unit count. 1 Software-engineer-year, and a $6 product (let's say $3 in bulk) for which the cheapest alternative is $35 in bulk. So let's say you take $100k (because it doesn't HAVE to be the bay area), that means you can spend one software engineer year per ~3k units. That would put just supporting this arch themselves, let's call it 3 software engineers, in range of anyone making 10k devices or more. That's a lot of people. That would make this
- oneplane 8y agoIt's not a one-off deal, support in Linux for example means you either need an unconstrained spec and third party maintainers, or having some person support it full time forever (or as long as the devices exist). Unmaintained code gets thrown out, that is why so few companies and projects do it; they are almost always a one-off with a short lifespan.