Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices

Re:Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices by jrockway on Sunday November 17, 2019 @05:30PM (#21560446)

I think there is a lot of ... cross pollination ... in the hardware industry, and companies are pursuing every angle to make sure that it's hard to figure out what IP they may have "independently discovered" that their competitors patented. I believe this is the reasoning NVidia gave for not open-sourcing their Linux drivers; everyone is copying everything and looking the other way. (It all started with the MOS/Motorola thing. Engineers took documents from Motorola to MOS, Motorola noticed, Motorola sued. Now people are more careful.)

As for datasheets, I feel like from certain vendors, they are "living documents" and every customer gets a different datasheet. You might mention in a meeting with the sales engineers "oh, we need a 100MHz SPI bus" and then they will edit the datasheet to say that the SPI bus works up to 100MHz. This is why there is an NDA, every customer gets a different datasheet exactly tailored to their needs.

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Re:Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices by taneq on Sunday November 17, 2019 @09:23PM (#21561439)

That “living (sales) document” thing absolutely happens at all scales I’ve seen in action.

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Re:Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices by catern on Sunday November 17, 2019 @06:39PM (#21560815)

That's an interesting explanation that I've never heard before, for why the hardware industry is reluctant to publish this stuff. It certainly seems credible.

You say:

>I believe this is the reasoning NVidia gave for not open-sourcing their Linux drivers

Do you happen to have a source for that? Or at least an explanation of why you think this is the case?

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