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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
But most of the population is uneducated in that regard. Blame the lack of enthusiasm for FOSS.