Why Don't Companies Release Specs?

Mhrmnhrm asks: "With the recent activism by the OpenBSD crew focusing on release of documentation from the likes of Adaptec, Intel, and others, I'm left to wonder: why do companies insist on believing that by denying access to the specs, they somehow gain an advantage? It's not like telling a programmer how to communicate with the underlying hardware is going to tell them how it (the PCB/silicon) was designed, so why make this information secret?"

Comments

Because it would cost them money

[c0d3h4x0r]

Because it would cost them money to (1) write coherent and complete documentation and (2) review that documentation to make it safe and legal for public consumption. Why would they spend all the extra time and money to do that when it doesn't bring them any more profit?

Companies exist to make money, not to be good samaritans.

Re:Because it would cost them money

[TekPolitik]

Because they (should) already have these docs to write the Microsoft driver ?

A lot of the hardware companies don't even write internal docs. They have hardware engineers write the device driver, and if you have ever reverse engineered a Windows device driver, you'd know that it shows. It is quite common to find serious and obvious bugs in the driver - mistakes of the kind even a mediocre professional software developer would never make. Sometimes the reverse engineering even reveals the use of algorithms that achieve things that are not even mathematically useful - although you can tell what they were trying to achieve, you can also tell that they have come up with an algorithm that has nothing whatsoever to do with achieving that goal.

This is one of the reasons Windows is so damned unreliable - they package drivers from these closed interface hardware shops, written by hardware engineers without the first clue about software development.

And yes, when the hardware engineers leave this all means the vendor isn't able to provide new drivers for that hardware - that's why you end up with 6 month old hardware that won't run on the operating system released today, and probably never will.

Re:Because it would cost them money

[drmerope]

Way to rag on hardware designers. I think we'll take our computers back now. Go back to your mechanical adding machines.

Seriously: have you see the code "programmers" make? Hardware designers tend to be extremely effective programmers--if only because they have a clue as the actual performance costs of their design decisions. Most programmers haven't got a clue that an IPI stalls all the activity on an SMP system let alone a reasonable sense of how costly that is.

From what I've seen, computer engineers get as much training is software engineering methodology as programmers.

The *trouble* is tight schedules and billion things you have to do.

Stated in an earlier post...

[erroneus]

... the more common problem is that the hardware people paid to have their drivers and stuff written for them and that a great deal of their product's functionality is, in fact, within the driver rather than within the device or firmware. These drivers are then restricted by the agreement between the driver-writing entity and the hardware maker... or so they claim. ATI apparantly has this difficulty which is why we can't get really good drivers for Linux just yet.

It's becuase of fear or lawsuits

[jonsmirl]

It's because of fear of lawsuits, not a desire to hide their chip interfaces. There are just as many bad hardware patents as bad software ones. By controlling spec release with an NDA they stop the law firms from searching for violations of these bogus patents.

The damage from keeping hardware specs out of open source hands is tiny compared to getting a $400M judgement for patent violation.

Trade secret laws prevent law firms from forcing spec releases without pretty good proof of a patent violation.

Software's dirty secret

[chiph]

...there are no specs.

Often products are created & sold based on some back-of-a-napkin drawing that a manager handed to development. I've been fortunate in my career -- I've been lucky to get them on notebook paper. It's much nicer than trying to figure out what was drawn through the martini condensation stains...

Chip H.

Re:Broadcom fun

[The Vulture]

I used to work in the DOCSIS cable modem industry, so I'm reasonably familiar with the Broadcom 335x/334x CPU family. The best I ever saw was the datasheet for the 3416 chip (tuner chip).

For those of you who aren't aware, or don't remember, Broadcom was slapped with a lawsuit by Microtune, alleging patent violations http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-5064586.html, (one of many articles available on this subject).

So, I was tasked with providing software support for the 3416 tuner chip (the replacement for the 3415 "problem" chip) in our cable modem product, as the 3415 couldn't legally be sold in the U.S. anymore. Well, I figured it would be easy, since the datasheets for the two chips were exactly the same, except that "3415" was changed to "3416". (And, I mean exactly the same, to the word - it was only a 15 page datasheet, so I compared them).

Nope, good old Broadcom documentation does it again... I managed to study the source code for one of the newer cable modem CPUs and find the changes between the chips. The real stupid thing though: Even though there's a version register (which tells which version the chip is), they didn't update it to indicate a 3415/3416, even though they had the bits available. So, 3416 chips would show up as 3415 chips if you try to read the version number (that made things difficult).

Incidentally, Broadcom does make Linux drivers for most of it's newer hardware, they're just meant for their customers (the OEMs making the hardware, not the end-users). The general rule with Broadcom is, if you pay them a lot of money, you get excellent support. (At the previous company I worked for, I had an engineer that would get back to me within 24 hours on any issue related to the product, because we bought so many cable modem chips. When I currently work, they won't even give us the time of day, we just don't purchase enough.)

I feel your pain, I really do.

-- Joe