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For those curious: As part of the Nexus device support, Google releases factory images. These images contain all the blobs and whatnot necessary to restore yo
by aroch 13y ago
For those curious:
As part of the Nexus device support, Google releases factory images. These images contain all the blobs and whatnot necessary to restore your device's OS even in the event of a soft-brick. In the case of the new Nexus 7, it appears Google won't be releasing factory images and the cause is almost certainly the fact that Qualcomm doesn't want to release it's proprietary blobs for the Adreno GPU.
JBQ is pissed about this, this isn't the first time a vendor hasn't allowed release of certain blobs or the first time a vendor has refused to release the code necessary to even boot the device.
- tootie 13y agoCapitalism sucks sometimes.
- algebr 13y agoWhat does Capitalism have to do with this?
- hahainternet 13y agoThe motive for profit drives the motive to keep secrets.
- Aldo_MX 13y agoWhen the competition starts using your own improvements/innovations against your products, you are obliged to keep the secret.
- pessimizer 13y agobecause capitalism.
- hahainternet 13y agoThis is only the case when you have something to fear from superior competition. That is the capitalist system. Even in the FOSS world, which is largely affected by capitalism the spirit of sharing and collective advancement is incredibly common.
- Aldo_MX 13y agoLet me rephrase my statement, because I didn't make my main idea clear enough: "When the competition starts using your own improvements/innovations against your products, and they are not moving a single finger to push innovation, you are obliged to keep the secret." I don't mind if the competition improves my work, this is more than enough incentive to push innovation forward, but when the competition stalls and makes a verbatim implementation of my work, or worse enough, depends solely on my improvements to stay relevant, I honestly prefer to keep the secret to myself. I don't want parasite competitors, I want talented competitors.
- jolohaga 13y ago"This is only the case when you have something to fear from superior competition" What you describe also occurred/occurs in Cuba, and that's not a capitalistic regime.
- hahainternet 13y agoI'm unsure of your point. Of course it's not capitalist to share, but that doesn't mean it's not right.
- zobzu 13y agoisn't that the spirit of open source? Yep IS IT.
- vutekst 13y agoThere are many motives for keeping secrets. Look at the NSA, or pretty much any government.
- hahainternet 13y agoWell certainly, but in this case the motivation is anticompetitive.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoOr procompetitive, depending on one's outlook.
- hahainternet 13y agoI fail to see how keeping secrets can be procompetitive. The existence of a larger barrier to entry surely prevents competition.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoIt rewards success and thus incentivizes more competition.
- bestham 13y agoWell, in this particular case I agree. Its unlikley that you will make your own ARM SOC or blobs because the Snapdragon blobs are unavalible to you. But one can see the secrets as an anti-feature and choose an alternative supplier that is less secret. While Google / Asus didnt the end users might.
- hahainternet 13y agoAh I see you're saying that keeping secrets may motivate clients to pick someone other than you, and potentially increase competitiveness if the market presence of 'secret keepers' is minimal. I think it's pretty tricky to consider that a real 'effect', as if the alternative companies kept secrets then it would be just as bad.
- mikevm 13y agoIt also drives innovation.
- fhd2 13y agoQuite the contrary in my experience, capitalism typically restrains innovation. Patent trolls are just one of many examples. Not saying I've got a better idea than capitalism, but I wouldn't consider it ideal.
- simonh 13y agoIt's the worst system we know of, except for all the others.
- TelmoMenezes 13y agoPatents are only possible through government regulation. Without the government's interference, there would be no such concept. Pure capitalism has no patents.
- 15charusername 13y agoEven with Patent trolls and week patents, patents still allow companies to license innovative technology rather than hide it away for fear of copying (ala qualcomm) Patents are a good idea, it's the current implementation that sucks
- antihero 13y agoIt may be a factor on slow improvement, but true innovation comes from the passionate minds of geniuses.
- dm2 13y agoWhat other reason would a company (Qualcomm) refuse to allow their software to be published?
- Aldo_MX 13y agoTo make it harder to bootleg vendors, for example.
- av500 13y agothe ones that buy Qualcomm chips off the black market?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sliverstorm 13y agoImitations sneak into above-the-table supply streams all the time. The bootlegger need only imitate the package shape and markings, and even knowledgeable people may not notice.
- marshray 13y agoChips as complex as SoC's having GPUs are being produced by counterfeiters who are not just copying the package and artwork, but actually making clones working only from published documentation and redistributable drivers? But they would be thwarted by license agreements making the drivers generally nonredistributable?
- sliverstorm 13y agoIt definitely is something that usually happens to simpler chips that are easy to reproduce. I'm not even trying to say it is likely that someone is or would bootleg the SoCs- just that the earlier argument that there wouldn't be any black-market buyers is irrelevant, because bootleg parts make their way in to legitimate supply streams all the time.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoActually the onus here is on Google. They could create a pre-condition of using someone's chip that the blobs for the GPU can be released. But they didn't do that.
- DannyBee 13y agoYou should try this sometime. Even if you sell millions of devices, SoC vendors don't care and aren't willing to deal. (This is why, for example, when I hear that Ubuntu edge, which can't even sell 45,000 phones, will "try" to come with free drivers, i laugh)
- ChuckMcM 13y agoWell in one regard they already did a variation, when the original G1 was being designed it was a deal breaker if the blobs for the radio couldn't be distributed. That said, one of the interesting "advantages" that Samsung and Apple get here is that they are their own SoC vendors. Google will have to get into this game eventually.
- Zigurd 13y agoThis is a very good point. When Android was first released, it was a unique opportunity to study the relationship between an open source RIL layer and the underlying RIL library, in part because you could build and run Android with the RIL library. There are tons of claims of secret sauce in RIL implementations, no less than there are for GPU drivers.
- _delirium 13y agoI don't disagree with your last point per se, but it seems weird that it would be necessary. For very tightly integrated things, I can believe that vertical integration is the optimal solution. But having to vertically integrate just because doing it any other way requires dealing with shit vendors seems to suggest a rather poorly functioning marketplace. If all Google wants is an off-the-shelf product with non-onerous licensing, but the only way to get that is to actually acquire a vendor because nobody will sell otherwise, that comes across as at least somewhat troubling.
- javert 13y agoWithout capitalism, we'd be writing letters to each other.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago.. about how happy we are, what with the eradication of poverty, waste and hunger!?
- kbolino 13y agoThe mistake that Marx, like you, made was in thinking that inequality was a product of capitalism, when in fact inequality is the inherent state of mankind, and moreover of all living things.
- dkuntz2 13y agoI don't think it was a mistake, and I don't think it's a static state. I believe that a group of people could come together and form a community founded on equality. The problem, to me, is more of a logistics problem, because once you get more than ~100 people in an organization, you start losing the immediate connection with them, which means you care less about their well being, because you don't know them. The issue is managing people, and meaningfully punishing ne'er-do-wells.
- kbolino 13y agoWhat you are essentially saying is that people can create a community with the intent of making everyone equal, but they will invariably fail because people are, in fact, not equal. Liberalism and Leninism are two consequences of this axiom. The former tries to provide the weaker but more feasible guarantee of equality of opportunity. The latter tries to make people believe they are equal by getting them to ignore inequality.
- dkuntz2 13y agoNo, because communities are small scale. History has proven that communities can exist in such a state. Societies need to have intent behind them. No society has ever existed without intent behind it. Leninism worked, we know for a fact that it worked, at least until Stalin took over and made it something worse that ultimately didn't work.
- omegaworks 13y agoCapitalism might be the motive, but what's preventing AOSP from really taking off is the patents and copyrights on the proprietary device firmware. Capitalism would get along just fine without patents and copyrights. No one likes to admit that though.
- lukifer 13y agoPatents are absolutely unnecessary, and arguably immoral. Copyrights, on the other hand, I'm not so sure. They absolutely go too far both in age and scope, and the market would benefit greatly by moving to 10-20 year copyrights with stronger "fair use" protections. But capitalism works based not just on what you can produce, but what you can withhold. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem: if anyone can hit a "clone chair" button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers. Perhaps spare-time activity or alternative business models would supply the necessary labor, but it's iffy: see the never-ending battle between open-source and propietary software, which I expect will persist long into the future. Believe me, I'm in favor of a free global library of all intellectual and creative human output, which algorithmically rewards all creators proportional to their results (or alternately, a society wealthy enough to subsidize its creators such that incentives aren't as necessary). But that represents an enourmous technical and political challenge, to say the least.
- CleanedStar 13y ago> But capitalism works based not just on what you can produce, but what you can withhold. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem: if anyone can hit a "clone chair" button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers. You contradict yourself once here. You say capitalism is based on what can be withheld. Another word for that might be scarcity. In 1932 Lionel Robbins said "Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." This is still the modern mainstram definition of capitalism. Then you say: > if anyone can hit a 'clone chair' button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers The idea that value comes from the labor of chair makers is a Marxist idea. You are making a Marxist argument here. It also contradicts your first argument. You say value comes from scarcity (modern mainstream economists agree), then you say value comes from labor (which is what Marx said) which contradicts the first argument. You're trying to make a Marxist argument for capitalism (Actually Marx did make an argument for capitalism - he said it was better than feudalism and slavery, but that's not what I mean here). You should go on the web and read about the subjective theory of value, and then about the labor theory of value. You argue STV in the first sentence and then LTV in the second. They can not both be right, their definition of value is contradictory. I should note you're not the first person I see making this error. As things become digital they lose their scarcity. I see all kinds of odd statements come out of this. You're not alone in this. But across the entire political spectrum, from far left to far right, all serious students of the economy agree only one side can be right, value comes from either subjective marginal/scarce/utility reasons or from a certain type of labor, but it is either one or the other. You flip back and forth between a capitalist-supporting argument and a Marxist argument. A Marxist argument for capitalism. I see this more and more, and I find it odd.
- antihero 13y agoOr if you are in the vast percentage of the world that is working stupid hours for pittance and barely able to feed their families or personally develop in any way, or had their land and homes sold off by the government to multinationals, or those who wish to contribute to charity or the world but cannot because of extortionate rents and cost of living, or those in prisons because they are run for profit and thus courts favour custodial sentences, or those who's race means that they do not have access to the tools to succeed as easily (or at all), or those who are pressured into insecurity because people make a buck off of their lack of self-confidence, all the time. We in the west are overfed pigs standing on the backs of billions.
- wmf 13y agoAren't those blobs already "released" on the device itself?
- ajross 13y agoSure. And the community projects use them, often via complicated scripting to pull them off of existing devices, or just a "gray market" where people share blobs directly or just throw them up on servers without worrying about it. But what Google needs is a license to redistribute this software in a form where it can be used by an AOSP build, not just as part of a finished device. Apparently the couldn't get it.
- wmf 13y agoSo it's a repeat of the OLPC Marvell issue, starting negotiations after the deal is done.
- speeder 13y agoCan you tell me the story or provide links for that? I make apps for children and I would very much appreciate information on the subject of OLPC and Marvell
- noonat 13y agoI am not familiar with this issue myself, but this appears to be a decent summary of it: http://www.cmosnetworks.com/OLPC-MarvellIssue-MyWriteUpOfTheSituation.html http://www.cmosnetworks.com/OLPC-MarvellIssue-MyWriteUpOfThe...
- cjbprime 13y agoDo you mean the redistributable Marvell wifi firmware? That permission came through pretty quickly, unrelated to Theo deRaadt's weird flame. It just took time, but still happened before production of the laptop started. As I recall, there was never any disagreement between Marvell and OLPC about whether it ought to happen. (I was working at OLPC at the time.)
- hypersoar 13y agoThis happened before with the Nexus One and Nexus 4. Interestingly, the One, 4, and 7 comprise all the Nexus devices to have Qualcomm SoCs. http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/08/07/legal-issues-with-qualcomm-may-prevent-factory-images-for-new-nexus-7-flo-from-ever-being-published-jbq-strongly-implies/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/08/07/legal-issues-with-qu...
- aroch 13y agoI'm guessing the old N7 got factory images so quickly as it was uses a pretty old GPU at the time. Having owned a Nexus One I was pretty sad there were no factory images
- toomuchtodo 13y agoI'm assuming the blobs can be extracted from the devices and put online somewhere though, correct?
- Macha 13y agoYes. Technically illegal but basically what happens with custom ROMs for most non-Nexus devices.