Re:How is the free firmware for the Raspberry progressing?
by paulmd on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @12:57PM
(#31005268)
> What IP would Broadcom be "losing" by not releasing the driver code
what if there's some IP they licensed from another vendor in there somewhere and it's so entangled (or foundational - eg graphics IP, etc) that they can't release it at all?
what if there's some IP that they don't realize is licensed from another vendor and they get in trouble?
what if there isn't, but someone else says there is, function X is too close to our implementation, and it starts a big legal battle? Or what if you run into some patent troll who makes a business out of digging through code to find anything they can sue over?
what if there's some copyleft code some dumbshit engineer copy/pasted and it ends up leveraging the whole codebase open?
etc etc
This is a classic situation of "Broadcom gains nothing in the next quarter or even the next 5 years from releasing the source, only potential (if unlikely) downsides, and the only people who will be outraged are a handful of nerds who are ultimately irrelevant to Broadcom's (not RPi Foundation's) business".
It is a testament to the success of copyleft that people have now embraced that as the default and view proprietary stuff with outright suspicion just as a default, but a proprietary strategy is both legitimate operationally (nobody opens everything) and as a risk-mitigation strategy.
what if there's some IP they licensed from another vendor in there somewhere and it's so entangled (or foundational - eg graphics IP, etc) that they can't release it at all?
what if there's some IP that they don't realize is licensed from another vendor and they get in trouble?
what if there isn't, but someone else says there is, function X is too close to our implementation, and it starts a big legal battle? Or what if you run into some patent troll who makes a business out of digging through code to find anything they can sue over?
what if there's some copyleft code some dumbshit engineer copy/pasted and it ends up leveraging the whole codebase open?
etc etc
This is a classic situation of "Broadcom gains nothing in the next quarter or even the next 5 years from releasing the source, only potential (if unlikely) downsides, and the only people who will be outraged are a handful of nerds who are ultimately irrelevant to Broadcom's (not RPi Foundation's) business".
It is a testament to the success of copyleft that people have now embraced that as the default and view proprietary stuff with outright suspicion just as a default, but a proprietary strategy is both legitimate operationally (nobody opens everything) and as a risk-mitigation strategy.