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While most people probably agree that the full open sourcing is the best for the consumer, eventually somebody needs to be paid to do the work. It's easy to sa

While most people probably agree that the full open sourcing is the best for the consumer, eventually somebody needs to be paid to do the work. It's easy to say in hindsight where Android is massively successful, Google will someday allocate resources to recreate Qualcomm, from scratch, avoid patent issues like the consortia did with VC1, and expire the SoC industry. However that seems hard, also Apple has tried this and still hasn't finished an alternative to Qualcomm. Imagine it was 2006, when there was no one successful to copy. Even if Google were as rich then as it is today, but had the knowledge that Android was definitely going to be a hit, it would definitely not become a phone SoC company - neither did Microsoft nor Blackberry (did Nokia? I honestly don't know). They had the same conviction then in its success, so it didn't matter how much foresight about security issues affecting millions of people there would have been. In any circumstance, they would have not given the kit-and-kaboodle away for free in open source. They'd feel, much like Qualcomm feels today, that they designed something original. Oh, and so now it cannot be shared. Qualcomm got there first and sells this thing, that's the simplest reason they will never open source. They could achieve all your goals in a difference of execution, it's got nothing to do with the license of their source code. People have written secure closed source software. For me, there's an important difference between Linus Torvalds copying Unix to make Linux and some giant company copying some other giant company's stuff. Everyone is dancing around the fact that the two are not equivalent and pretending that they are. Someone eventually has to write original drivers that are good, for complex hardware. That person or entity has to get paid somehow. We're being really naive if we just assume that Google, an advertising company that in recent history never starts something unless there is already ample market success to follow (or displace), would do a good job, just because its engineers are highly paid, have lots of time and do algorithms questions well.

cycloptic 6y ago
>eventually somebody needs to be paid to do the work >That person or entity has to get paid somehow In my experience, it is very hard to get companies to even admit what the real cost of open sourcing something like this is. Lots of them just don't even want to talk about it or show their estimates at all, they just say "we will never open source" like Qualcomm does and the conversation goes nowhere. Even if the price is very high and it takes many years, we still need to start somewhere. Then the industry as a whole can chip away at it slowly, because even very slow progress is better than nothing at all. And what's even worse than no progress is if we just give up and sit around waiting for some other company like Google or Apple to foot 100% of the bill to redo all the work over again from scratch.
- g_p 6y ago
  I think part of the unwillingness is due to the incorporation of external third party IP they realise they have no real prospect of being able to get a license to open source. In some areas like imaging this always seemed to be particularly problematic - from memory, some of the early "Sony Mobile" Android devices (thinking Xperia Z, Z2 era, etc.) actually used TrustZone DRM to prevent use of certain imaging libraries they had "licensed in", in order to discourage/prevent reverse engineering of them by users that had unlocked the bootloader and thus would likely have root access to facilitate meddling with them. I believe that people eventually removed the TrustZone checks, but the intent was clear. This isn't Qualcomm directly though, but I imagine it shows part of the root of the challenge here.

cycloptic 6y ago

>eventually somebody needs to be paid to do the work >That person or entity has to get paid somehow In my experience, it is very hard to get companies to even admit what the real cost of open sourcing something like this is. Lots of them just don't even want to talk about it or show their estimates at all, they just say "we will never open source" like Qualcomm does and the conversation goes nowhere. Even if the price is very high and it takes many years, we still need to start somewhere. Then the industry as a whole can chip away at it slowly, because even very slow progress is better than nothing at all. And what's even worse than no progress is if we just give up and sit around waiting for some other company like Google or Apple to foot 100% of the bill to redo all the work over again from scratch.

g_p 6y ago
I think part of the unwillingness is due to the incorporation of external third party IP they realise they have no real prospect of being able to get a license to open source. In some areas like imaging this always seemed to be particularly problematic - from memory, some of the early "Sony Mobile" Android devices (thinking Xperia Z, Z2 era, etc.) actually used TrustZone DRM to prevent use of certain imaging libraries they had "licensed in", in order to discourage/prevent reverse engineering of them by users that had unlocked the bootloader and thus would likely have root access to facilitate meddling with them. I believe that people eventually removed the TrustZone checks, but the intent was clear. This isn't Qualcomm directly though, but I imagine it shows part of the root of the challenge here.