The documentation is not the burden as much as the requirement, or at least expectation, to adhere to the published specs once they are published. By not releasing any info they are not burdened with having to stay consistent on driver details from one product or version to the next.

I called my ebike company and apparently my year and make could have one of three different batteries. Seems infuriating, but hardware manufacturers don't have to be consistent I guess, just release some new/updated docs?

I wonder if it has to do with any underlying 3rd-party components. Otherwise, yeah, makes no sense.

It might be worth clarifying that Wacom is not taking that approach. But their statement there suggests that the underlying reason for lack of hardware support in Linux is the OpenSource nature of the software.

Well one way that comes to mind for why it could be considered a burden is breaking down internal documentation into public and private, and making sure that the private one is never exposed. As much as we don’t want to imagine business constraints on some manufacturers, they could always come up with reasons.

> And if I want to abuse some piece of hardware, such as making a musical instrument out of a pile of floppy disk drives, what business is that of the manufacturer?

As an example (maybe not a fair one) we can ask Tesla why they don’t want to expose some/all APIs that Tesla owners might want access to. I expect they would bring up a thousand reasons why, maybe safety related, maybe not.

I generally agree with you though, you paid and own something, and you wish to use it as you see fit. Unfortunately it seems like what we think we own and what we actually own are in some cases two separate things.

The safety issues are a red herring. It is the responsibility of the relevant regulatory authority to decide that not the manufacturer.

Some documentation, but when the guy who wrote the hardware is down the hall from the guy writing the documentation it typically isn't very good, saving a lot of effort