6 ms·
What other reason would a company (Qualcomm) refuse to allow their software to be published?
by dm2 13y ago
What 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.
- lmm 13y agoAIUI sometimes the workers physically producing the chips will sneak in at night and do an extra run. Or sell chips that failed quality control.
- aeturnum 13y agoI work for Qualcomm, and I never would have expected it, but apparently this happens. There are groups that buy busted phones, get the Qualcomm cellular modem chips out of them, and then put those chips into new devices. It's significantly cheaper than licensing, and I believe the current tactic to fight it is firmware-based.
- wmf 13y agoThat sounds like a totally legitimate case of first sale, so it seems evil to fight it.
- aeturnum 13y agoI get the impression the resulting products aren't particularly high quality and there's some notion of protecting consumers, but I would imagine the primary motivator is the loss of license fees.
- bloopletech 13y agoI don't want to come across too harshly, since you've engaged in the discussion and revealed that you work for qualcomm, but: Do you morally and ethically agree with the position that Qualcomm should get paid a licence fee for the firmware for each and every resale of a particular chip? (vs the spirit of the first sale doctrine) At the moment, it seems that you're giving tacit approval to this position.
- aeturnum 13y agoI identified myself as an employee of Qualcomm because, per policy, we're supposed to do so when discussing the company. :) I think it's reasonable to sell the chips under a restricted license - you don't expect people to use the chip in a product you don't know about. Consider a metaphor using a collection of short stories. You include your story in an anthology, which lets the buyer re-sell it at will. However, it would be questionable for the buyer to remove your story, and re-bind it as part of another book, which they then sell. These actions are not restricting the actions of customers in any way (as far as I know), so they seem ok to me. Edit: sorry about the delay in reply!
- marshray 13y agoDoes writing legal agreements to intentionally limit the market for your hardware chips make sense under capitalism?
- iyulaev 13y agoHell yeah! If I'm shipping 10M units to my 5 favorite customers, and my documentation comes in Engineer form, I don't want to waste my time writing up 20K pages of documentation (which is about how much it takes) so that hobbyists can buy the chips and then demand support, 5 units at a time.
- marshray 13y agoWho are these 'hobbyists' who 'demand' 20K pages of specially-written documentation? I suspect there are a lot of professional Engineers working on products that will ship fewer than 10M units. Sometimes these Engineers then go on to design products that ship more than 10M units and prefer to keep working with the chips they know. Sometimes those Engineers are 'hobbyists' too.
- iyulaev 13y agoSome vendors follow your suggested model, and are very open with support and documentation. Other vendors (some of the biggest are in this group) have terrible/non-existent documentation and provide application-specific support by shipping an engineer with the product. Modern SoCs demand thousands of pages to cover all available features and possible applications, and putting together that documentation in a self-consistent way is a challenge. Some vendors have decided that supporting low-revenue clients is not worth the cost of putting together said general-purpose documentation and providing support to each and every buyer. They'd rather not sell you the product in the first place than sell you something and stiff you on documentation & support, which is a reasonable position. Often when you're a low-quantity company you deal with low-quantity vendors who are willing to support you. When you move to high volume you might prefer to keep working with the chips you know. But when your operations guy comes back to you and says that the Big Co (who wouldn't talk to you in the past) can sell you chips for $5 less, that's $50M you just saved (given your 10M unit quantity). So you switch. In this example you have two different vendors: high cost / high support, low cost / "exclusive" support. Both have markets, just different ones. TI is an example of a vendor that is very hobbyist / small quantity friendly. Even that wasn't enough to save them - they've pulled out of the phone SoC business.
- devcpp 13y agoYou can't blame capitalism for that. In a free market, consumers can just stop buying Qualcomm products for a month, and I can guarantee you that a choking Qualcomm would release all they have as FOSS as fast as they could. But most of the population is uneducated in that regard. Blame the lack of enthusiasm for FOSS.
- nileshtrivedi 13y agoFOSS? The source code isn't the issue here. Qualcomm isn't allowing Google to distribute their proprietary binaries.
- devcpp 13y agoI was saying that with enough pressure, they wouldn't just allow redistribution or even publish the source code, they would even release it under the GPL and kiss the buyers' feet if asked to.
- general_failure 13y agoIt's obvious what the OP was trying to say. He is saying people don't care about rooting, source code, binary code and hacking in general.