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Comment by DominikR | Hacker News Reader

> 1. Qualcomm knows the product and has the engineers. Qualcomm is uniquely positioned to build usable reference implementations, chips, etc, and to charge for this service and for support. This requires no legal protection whatsoever.

Why should you or anyone else get to decide on how Qualcomm is monetising the product of their investment?

Qualcomm spent millions on developing this, nobody else should be able to decide this.

> 4. As you said, the sauce is secret. I think the question of whether Qualcomm should be permitted to keep the sauce secret and how much the law should help or hinder this secrecy is worthy of at lease some debate.

It is Qualcomm's property, they can keep it secret or open source it however they decide. I deeply reject the idea that government should have the right to order us to share our private property with the public.

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> It is Qualcomm's property, they can keep it secret or open source it however they decide. I deeply reject the idea that government should have the right to order us to share our private property with the public.

Mostly I agree with you, but I think it is worth noting that this discussion is in the context of patent protection for software.

One of the requirements of applying for a patent is providing a reference implementation - I believe this is what the parent was referring to when they mentioned whether or not Qualcomm should be "permitted to keep the sauce secret".

Well yes, if that's what he meant then it's something different. There's no point in allowing patents when nobody can know what implementation is patented in the first place.

>> 1. Qualcomm knows the product and has the engineers. Qualcomm is uniquely positioned to build usable reference implementations, chips, etc, and to charge for this service and for support. This requires no legal protection whatsoever. > > Why should you or anyone else get to decide on how Qualcomm is monetising the product of their investment? > > Qualcomm spent millions on developing this, nobody else should be able to decide this.

I said no such thing. I said that Qualcomm could do this, not that they must or that they should be required to.

>> 4. As you said, the sauce is secret. I think the question of whether Qualcomm should be permitted to keep the sauce secret and how much the law should help or hinder this secrecy is worthy of at lease some debate. > > It is Qualcomm's property, they can keep it secret or open source it however they decide. I deeply reject the idea that government should have the right to order us to share our private property with the public.

I don't think the government should, in general, require Qualcomm do share this secret sauce. But it just might be worth considering whether the government should require that the secret sauce that runs enormous numbers of devices (read: extremely high-value target if someone can break or pwn many of them) on wireless spectrum (which is a shared resource!) should be opened to independent auditors and security researchers as a precondition of being granted a license to operate on public spectrum.

Like I said, I think it's worthy of at least some debate.

Why should you or anyone else get to decide on how Qualcomm is monetising the product of their investment?

Because Qualcomm is riding the coat-tails of a government-issued investment protection? You can't argue for anti-free-trade policies by using free trade arguments.

While perhaps true for Qualcomm, it is hardly the case for all agents producing valuable knowledge.

For the sake of argument, if Qualcomm had no such connection to the government and has created it's products entirely from private funds, why should the government or other third parties have a right to dictate their product?

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