This 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-qu...

I'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

The 2012 N7 had an nVidia GPU, so no Qualcomm to mess with it

Also, it was not a Qualcomm chip....

I'm assuming the blobs can be extracted from the devices and put online somewhere though, correct?

Yes. Technically illegal but basically what happens with custom ROMs for most non-Nexus devices.

Aren't those blobs already "released" on the device itself?

Sure. 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.

So it's a repeat of the OLPC Marvell issue, starting negotiations after the deal is done.

Do 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.)

IIRC there was some documentation or firmware source that OLPC only asked for after they committed to use the Marvell chip and thus had no leverage.

The various libertas blobs, right? These affected development for the Guruplug/Dreamplug (maybe the Tonido), too.

Can 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

I am not familiar with this issue myself, but this appears to be a decent summary of it: http://www.cmosnetworks.com/OLPC-MarvellIssue-MyWriteUpOfThe...

Yes, but these are signed images meaning you can flash them even if you have a locked bootloader

Capitalism sucks sometimes.

Actually 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.

You 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)

Well 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.

>That said, one of the interesting "advantages" that Samsung and Apple get here is that they are their own SoC vendors.

Both Apple and Samsung heavily use Qualcomm products. The Samsung S4 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600. It should say something when Samsung isn't using it's own Exynos for it's premiere flagship device. The S4 also features a Qualcomm 4G LTE modem. And a Qualcomm power management chip. And audio codec.

The iPhone5 is almost as Qualcomm heavy itself, too.

I think Samsung and Apple would have equally as difficult of a time trying to release binaries (or source) as well, regardless of who is designing or assembling the SoC!

iirc QCOM chips are used in about 30% of Samsung smartphones (iirc the highest end ones?). The rest are Samsung chips.

I would be surprised to learn that Samsung did not use Qualcomm modems and other more minor parts.

I 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.

It is not really surprising that a market with very high barriers to entry can be poorly-functioning. They usually are.

It's not that weird if you're the SOC vendor. After all, if you withhold the blobs, then whenever people want a newer operating system, they have to buy a new device. The last thing someone like Qualcomm want is for you to be able to run Android 5 on your 2 year old device. They like the current throwaway model just fine, thanks.

To tell whether or not it's a poorly functioning marketplace we'd have to know how much more Google was willing to pay for more generous licensing terms. My guess is $0, because the benefit for Google is questionable.

This 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.

The Nexus question was about permission to distribute the proprietary blobs - free software drivers (in the case of Ubuntu Edge) is a different problem.

Google could always use chips only from vendors that allow redistribution of the blobs, make it a contractual requirement when commissioning Nexus devices.

There's no need to be pointlessly snarky. Nobody has any idea how many units of the Ubuntu edge will "sell", because it's not for sale yet. It's ridiculous to consider an $800 commitment to back a product which will exist a year from now at best a "sale".

This was not a comment on ubuntu edge per-se, only the likelihood of it actually having free drivers at launch if they are only kickstarting 45k units.

The same thing would be true if it sold a million units.

This implies a dramatic lack of competition in the SoC market if you can't shop around and find a vendor that will at least provide release images to flash devices with openly, if not actual open specification devices with FOSS drivers.

There is a dramatic lack of competition. We find ourselves in the odd position of hoping Intel will come in and shake up the market.

Which, I presume, is why to my knowledge they've never said that they'll "try".

Mark Shuttleworth said this in his AMA: "In future generations, it would be great to see if we can do an all-open device, for example." -- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...

"So in this first generation Edge, no, we didn't look for open hardware specifically. We can choose silicon with more open drivers as we finalise the spec"

If you assume that they're doing something that they haven't claimed to, then you can continue laughing at nothing, I suppose.

Then I see mixed messages. " '... we'll ship this with Android and Ubuntu, no plans to put proprietary applications on it. We haven't finalized the silicon selection so we're looking at the next generation silicon from all major vendors. I would like to ship it with all Free drivers.'"

Sure sounds like "we'll try" to me

I don't think it's a problem if you're willing to use less capable hardware. Think Intel i7 vs. Lemote Loongson.

Yeah, but what smartphone vendor is willing to take a 20x hit on performance in exchange for open blob licensing? Performance sells phones much more than blob licensing ever will.

The Nexus devices are supposed to be developer devices and should therefore have other priorities. An unlocked bootloader is not enough for a developer phone.

They are getting to use a popular OS free of charge though, seems like Qualcomm would have very little negotiating power.

They don't need negotiating power. Qualcomm can tell Google to shove it -- the Android code is still published under the Apache license and as long as they don't claim to have written it themselves, they're free to do whatever they want with it.

Google could certainly tell LG/Samsung/HTC that a condition of getting the next Nexus deal is that all binaries must be able to be freely distributed by Google and let them put pressure on the SoC vendors, but I doubt the Nexus line sells enough or drives enough profit for anyone to take such a threat seriously.

Capitalism 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.

Patents 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.

> 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.

> 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.

The quote there appears to be defining "Economics", not "capitalism".

I'm curious about this: when did Capitalism stop meaning "the opposite of cottage industry" and start meaning "a market with limited regulation"? Was it Marx that introduced this?

The academics are interesting, but I'm talking about the more tangible microeconomic concerns: How can an author get paid for their book if anyone can print their own copy? What investor would invest in a movie if it can be downloaded for free? There are possible answers to these questions, but I'm skeptical whether replacing copyright completely with alternative business models and hobbyists would result in the same level (and quality) of production.

What does Capitalism have to do with this?

The motive for profit drives the motive to keep secrets.

It also drives innovation.

Quite 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.

Patents are only possible through government regulation. Without the government's interference, there would be no such concept. Pure capitalism has no patents.

Even 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

It's the worst system we know of, except for all the others.

It may be a factor on slow improvement, but true innovation comes from the passionate minds of geniuses.

When the competition starts using your own improvements/innovations against your products, you are obliged to keep the secret.

This 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.

Let 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.

"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.

I'm unsure of your point. Of course it's not capitalist to share, but that doesn't mean it's not right.

because capitalism.

isn't that the spirit of open source? Yep IS IT.

There are many motives for keeping secrets. Look at the NSA, or pretty much any government.

Well certainly, but in this case the motivation is anticompetitive.

Or procompetitive, depending on one's outlook.

I fail to see how keeping secrets can be procompetitive. The existence of a larger barrier to entry surely prevents competition.

Well, 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.

Ah 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.

It rewards success and thus incentivizes more competition.

What other reason would a company (Qualcomm) refuse to allow their software to be published?

You 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.

FOSS? The source code isn't the issue here. Qualcomm isn't allowing Google to distribute their proprietary binaries.

It'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.

I 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.

To make it harder to bootleg vendors, for example.

the ones that buy Qualcomm chips off the black market?

I 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.

So basically, they're doing something that saves money and is good for the environment, but it cuts into your profits.

That sounds like a totally legitimate case of first sale, so it seems evil to fight it.

I 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.

I 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.

I 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!

and these people are not able to copy/steal the needed driver binary from one of these phones?

They are, but it sounds like Qualcomm is trying to introduce some kind of driver DRM so that the driver will only work on "new" chips but not "used" ones.

What's the worst that can happen, right? Haha! Because DRM always works perfectly and the legitimate customer is never stung by it. Cool!

And I thought IP protection couldn't get more ridiculous than the Lexmark toner case.

Imitations 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.

Chips 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?

It 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.

AIUI sometimes the workers physically producing the chips will sneak in at night and do an extra run. Or sell chips that failed quality control.

Does writing legal agreements to intentionally limit the market for your hardware chips make sense under capitalism?

Hell 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.

Who 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.

Some 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.

I recall going to TI's site regularly over a period of months looking at OMAP chips in small quantities and finding them continually backordered. I know some people got dev kits. Ultimately, they were just an another ARM licensee with a GPU of questionable utility (to me).

Or 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.

Without capitalism, we'd be writing letters to each other.

Frankly, if the internet had been driven by the desire to make profit in the early days, we wouldn't have TCP/IP, the web, email or any other open protocol for that matter.

I don't know why fhd2 was downvoted. Hippies created BSD and TCP/IP; suits created Compuserve and X.whatever.

Yes, but it wasn't until the internet was opened up for commerce that it became widely adopted.

Yes, but without the open nature of network protocols, it would not have been able to have become widely adopted.

This is such a load of nonsense. Did Curie, Feynman, Einstein, Turing, Berners-Lee, and the inventors/scientists behind 99% of human history do it for the money? No. Of course not. How absurd and insulting to cheapen the wonders of their invention and minds with the banality of money.

In fact, imagine how far we'd be if great minds weren't restrained by having to pay rent, or work around mainstream stupidity, or having to use cheap equipment, or facing patents and other laws created to protect the captalists.

Just because we've never seen a working communist country, it doesn't mean it could never work - to think otherwise would be luddite and ignorant.

Yeah, 'cause ARPA was definitely a capitalist agency.

You mean a capitalist aggressor agency, according to the Soviets.

.. about how happy we are, what with the eradication of poverty, waste and hunger!?

I don't know about eradication but the millenium goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 was achieved in 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals#Pr...

The 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.

I 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.

What 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.

No, 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.

History has proven no such thing. Every community has its leaders, and those leaders enjoy a privileged position. Indeed, Leninism is quite successful: at establishing a party of elites, whose job it is to convince everybody else that they're equal and to teach them to ignore the obvious contradictions. I did not say that "society [should] exist[] without intent behind it"; I said that intentions don't matter if the results contradict them.

>thinking that inequality was a product of capitalism //

I don't think that [nor am I inclined to think did Marx]. I think capitalism exacerbates it drastically to a markedly negative effect (though not so negative as say malevolent dictatorship). Moreover I don't perceive inequality as detrimental, it's a truism that none are equal after all.

However I do certainly have communist beliefs about the best forms for society to adopt.

And what of those who dissent to your "best form for society to adopt"? It takes intelligent and productive people (as in, it takes intelligent people, productive people, and people who are both) to make such a society work. When you provide no incentives for intelligence or productivity, because those incentives create inequality, then such people will complain (upsetting the balance), leave (gutting the society), sabotage (undermining the society), or simply stop caring (grinding the society to a halt). What then?

The problem is that capitalism only seeks to enhance the positive feedback system of inequality - having money gives you more power to make more money and thus have more power. Being poor gives you less power to make money and thus it is much harder to become richer.

The problem with redistribution (aside from its inherent immorality as theft backed by force) is that you simply shift power from the people who had wealth to the people who are doing the redistributing. At no point do the vast majority of people ever become more powerful. In the new system, power is obtained by currying the favor of party officials. Even contrasted against the most egregious Marxist caricature of capitalism, how is this any better?