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).