| There is a bunch of hardware in the world that is inaccessible. I don't see this changing. Reasons include: Keeping competitors away from what you think are valuable secrets and maintaining an advantage. Keeping people away from features that, if misused, could result in chip damage. Keeping security holes secret (e.g., badly designed DMA hardware that could be exploited, if the flaws were known). Limiting access to known buggy features, or unfinished features that either don't work or that could leak damaging hints about strategic direction. You have purchased or licensed 3rd party technology that you contractually cannot divulge details of. For interoperability with other products you have embedded knowledge of them in the product, under NDA. More: It's expensive to document chips to the point that outside development can be done. Perhaps the documentation doesn't exist, at all, and would have to be reverse-engineered out of the chip design (yes, this happens). It's expensive to write drivers for multiple platforms, or even to get software into a state where it can be consumed by an outside party (just dumping a tree onto GitHub is /not/ a release). You feel that "forking" would result in a loss of control of your own product (and would dramatically increase the cost of future releases, lest you break things). You regularly rev chips and cover the changes transparently in the software layer, and this would /not/ be transparent if you released product details (thus increasing the cost of revisions). More (the slimey side): You have misappropriated technology and divulging it would be harmful to you. There are design errors or bugs verging on malfeasance that could expose you to litigation. You have lied about the product's capabilities and a release would reveal this (whereupon, litigation). Or, it's a pain in the ass, the market is significantly less than 1 percent of your total, and you have a horizontal skyscraper of engineers already behind schedule. "Good faith and being nice" doesn't pay the bills. [I have also heard, from other parts of the industry, that the company in question is hard to deal with]. |
Some companies have a financial incentive to effective tell the open source movement to f-- off. Sure, when they take that, they may not be being evil on a grand scale. But hey, if they are telling linux to f-- off, it seems appropriate Linus return the favor. He's just making things clear.
Is there anything wrong that?