Reflections on the hardware industry
Feb 09, 2009, 10:03 (1 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Harald Welte)
[ Thanks to Jose_X
for this link. ]
"The entire food chain in between, at least one level
of OEM and ODM - possibly more - prevents the actual existing
demand from those smaller innovative companies to ever reach what
the chip maker perceives as specs. Those intermediaries (OEM/ODM)
typically have very limited skill and understanding about anything
related to Software, not even talking about FOSS. They know how to
make many boards cheap. In fact, their skill typically is so low
that all they can use for their products are so-called turnkey
solutions: A full reference board design and complete software
stack that they can copy+paste with only the most superficial
modifications.
"This is why no single mainboard maker (probably apart from
Intel's mainboard division and some parts of Dell) ever tries to
boot a Linux Live-CD on one of their boards before shipping it, or
bothers to get their ACPI tables correct. Whoever buys most of
those boards doesn't have "ACPI compliance" or "Linux support" in
their specs. The fact that there are hundreds of small companies
who each might do thousands of units for niche markets desperately
look for products with good Linux support [which is impossible
without open source] doesn't matter.
"Or in the embedded networking market for DSL modems, WiFi
routers or the like, none of the large buyers (i.e. ISPs or Telcos)
has "frequent security updates" on their spec. The security updates
would be something that requires the chip maker to use (and follow)
more recent kernels, and could even drive them away from
proprietary kernel modules, since the ABI and API incompatibilities
would probably make them quite hard."
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