[jdietrich]

The consumer space is brutally competitive - you're working on tight margins and designs become obsolete very quickly. MediaTek's business is built on selling chips with the latest features at the lowest possible price. Everything has to be done at a breakneck pace that is dictated by the silicon. You start writing firmware as soon as the hardware design is finalised; it needs to be ready as soon as the chips are ready to ship. These conditions are not at all suited to good software engineering.

In an ideal world, consumers would be happy to pay a premium for a device that's a generation behind in terms of features but has really good firmware. In the real world, only Apple have the kind of brand and market power to even attempt that.

[AnthonyMouse]

> you're working on tight margins and designs become obsolete very quickly.

This seems like the exact place where open source is a competitive advantage.

Step 1, open source your existing firmware for the previous generation hardware. The people who have the hardware now fix problems you didn't have the resources to fix.

Step 2, fork the public firmware for the previous generation hardware when developing the next generation. It has those bug fixes in it and 90% of the code is going to be the same anyway. Publish the new source code on the day the hardware ships in volume but not before. By then it doesn't matter if competitors can see it because "designs become obsolete very quickly" and it's too late for them to use it for their hardware/firmware in this generation. They don't get to see your next generation code until that generation is already shipping. Firmware tricks that span generations and have significant value can't be kept secret anyway because any significant firmware-based advantage would be reverse engineered by competitors for the next generation regardless of whether they have the source code.

Now your development costs are lower than competitors' because you didn't have to pay to fix any bugs that one of your customers fixed first, and more people buy your hardware because your firmware is less broken than the competition.

[AlotOfReading]

What happens in that case is that competitors copy your hardware and throw the open source firmware on it to undercut you. Consumers don't know how to differentiate your products without marketing/segmentation and OEMs mostly care about the BOM cost. It doesn't matter much that your competitors are 2-6 months behind because they're still killing the long tail sales that sustain a company.

Note that I'm still pro-open source, but I've seen this cycle play out in the real world enough times to understand why manufacturers are paranoid about releasing anything that might help a competitor, even if it benefits their customers.

[AnthonyMouse]

> What happens in that case is that competitors copy your hardware and throw the open source firmware on it to undercut you.

The entire premise of firmware is that it's specific to the hardware. By the time they "copy your hardware" it's already obsolete. Also, that's the thing you're actually selling. Your firmware sucks. Nobody wants your firmware unless they have your hardware. People are paying you for the hardware, which is the thing cheap competitors can't make as well as you or you're already screwed.

[mschuster91]

> You start writing firmware as soon as the hardware design is finalised; it needs to be ready as soon as the chips are ready to ship.

On top of that, there's bound to be errors in the hardware design, no modern technology even comes close to being formally proven correct, it's just too damn complex/large. Only after the first tapeout of an ASIC you can actually test it and determine what you need to correct and where to correct it (microcode, EC firmware, OS or application layer).

[JonChesterfield]

Intel networking used to have the expensive and works traits. Not confident their current products would be as good.

[phil21]

Indeed. A friend who is more plugged into such things me told me 4-5 years ago they laid off most of the senior Intel network driver team. Basically the only edge they had. I can’t imagine things are any better these days.

Inertia is a hell of a thing, but you are starting to see the cracks form. I just don’t know if there is an alternative.

[sofixa]

When? The Intel X710 series of network cards was released in 2014, and it wasn't until ~2018 that it became actually usable (end of 2018? I don't recall really, but when I stumbled upon it it had already been a public problem for more than a year, and it took a few more months for patches to come).

I'm talking things like full OS crashes while doing absolutely nothing, no traffic whatsoever or even better, silently starting to drop all network traffic (relatively silently, just an error message in the logs, but otherwise no indication, the interface still shows up as fine and up in the OS). It was all a driver issue (although both Intel drivers didn't work, so not only) that was later fixed.

After that, it was rock solid. But the fact that there was a high class network card sold for lots of money, on hardware compatibility lists at various vendors, which didn't work at all for pretty much everyone for more than a few years is disgusting.

[to11mtm]

Back at the start of the century, Intel networking cards were the 'Best reliability for the dollar' and for some reason had a grudge against Linksys even before the Cisco buyout [0]. Same for most of their B/G Wireless stuff.

[0] - That came up once.

[tuetuopay]

you'd be glad to hear the e810 series is not better in this regard. at least the out-of-tree driver somewhat works, and supports more than 1 queue.