Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcp | Hacker News Reader

The inconveniences we're describing are limited to the suckers that get to write the firmware/drivers for these things, i.e. a few engineers.

Price, performance, availability, driver quality, etc may look competitive to the competition and affect a few million users.

If you sell a few million of these, saving 5 cents on the Wifi chip pays at least for 2 engineers full-time to deal with whatever issues Broadcom gives you.

View on HN

In my case, the problem went beyond that. They put in patch that made the BLE transmit out of spec. Plus their lack of support added at least 3 months to our launch dates. We had everything in place but couldn't launch because of Wifi RF issues that was not documented. Long story short, overall the savings was not worth it. It cost us more in R&D, NRE as compared to BOM.

Still, why aren't there good drivers ? or why isn't a way for affordably buying/sharing drivers for such chips , as a way to solve that problem ?

If you've chosen a cheaper chip and paid an engineer to work through the crappy documentation to write a driver, why would you give this away? It just helps your competition.

It may still make sense if the maintenance burden is high and upstreaming has benefits, but that's not always the case.

OK. So what about a third party developing and selling drivers ?

Because in my experience, hardware companies don't know how to write good software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com