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Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

It's hard not to view this sort of stuff as saber rattling (or, more accurately, whining) from the OSHW community.

TI is more than happy to work with you on their most cutting edge designs if you're shipping in appreciable volume. Talking a quarter million chips or more per year. That's just the way the wind blows in their business. Gotta recoup as much R&D expenditure as possible up front. I've worked with them on these sorts of designs. They employ tons of really sharp engineers and still make lots of high quality, very useful chips. You just have to buy enough of them for it to be worth it for TI to work with you.

No OSHW application I know of has ever moved enough units to cross this bar. Not even close.

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I can understand hardware vendors not actively working with you on designs unless you're buying in volume. That's fine, they're a business, they have to make money and not lose money.

What I don't understand about the hardware industry is the extent to which they actively restrict access to information on how their product works unless you're buying in volume. Why is it necessary to have layers of NDAs on a product datasheet? Many of the people who might write software to integrate with some hardware are not the people manufacturing high-volume products based on it! (See: Linux driver developers.)

> I can understand hardware vendors not actively working with you on designs unless you're buying in volume.

I also understand. But in some ways I disagree: set a higher price instead. Let me, the customer, decide if the price is too high.

That’s always weird to me. Other companies do the same by hiding specs and documentation from people who aren’t paying big money. I always thought it was supposed to be better to spread your information as widely as possible so people can familiarize themselves with your product resulting in potential future sales.

I always thought it was supposed to be better to spread your information as widely as possible so people can familiarize themselves with your product resulting in potential future sales.

That makes a lot of sense - if you're building a software platform.

If you're building a chip, it makes sense to be the first mover on the cutting edge. By obscuring specs, your competitors won't know what specs are the most valuable to your customers. That sort of thing is critically important to semiconductor business.

Why is it necessary to have layers of NDAs on a product datasheet? Many of the people who might write software to integrate with some hardware are not the people manufacturing high-volume products based on it!

Because obscuring the use case and the customer of a cutting edge chip is a semiconductor company's most reasonable moat these days. If you telegraph what big customers are buying by freely sharing your most cutting edge product portfolio, someone else will copy it. (Probably someone in China with a hefty dose of subsidy from the gov't.) Classic case of "Your margin is my opportunity."

ADI or On Semi can, and will, catch TI after 18-36 months of development effort. The longer TI can keep them off their tail by making it hard to see what customers are buying, the more profit they can make without a reasonable competitor on the market.

Software is a commodity that TI distributes as a compliment to the thing that actually makes them money, which is selling chips. For analog circuits, this is completely irrelevant, and doesn't affect their operating procedure. For processors and peripherals that require drivers, it's a cost of doing business for them - not an enabling feature.

Don't you loose out on potential customers though? Since they will also be unaware it exists.

The big customers are the only ones who matter. They are all like this. The DMCA would have been the pearl clutching lawyers. I used to think it was short sighted but I'm not so sure anymore, I think they could all be better to their customers and their firmware examples etc could be multiple orders of magnitude better and it wouldn't hurt the bottom line.

>Software is a commodity that TI distributes as a compliment to the thing that actually makes them money, which is selling chips. ... For processors and peripherals that require drivers, it's a cost of doing business for them - not an enabling feature.

It's a cost of doing business that would be ameliorated by telling people how to use the product, because then they're not the only ones able to do the work. I'll use Linux drivers again as an example: I can only imagine the money it must cost for these SoC manufacturers to keep their kernel forks with binary blob drivers up to date with mainline Linux, and the security vulnerabilities that go unpatched in their products when they don't. That's money that Intel and AMD just don't have to spend; they contribute to the kernel, yes, but they're far from the only ones doing the work.

It's a cost of doing business that would be ameliorated by telling people how to use the product, because then they're not the only ones able to do the work

...if you're talking about processors, sure. But only talking about processors gives a really narrow view of TI's business, and doesn't add any context into why they sell the way they do. They make a ton of money on analog applications that require no OSSW support at all. They know how to sell chips that way - they've been doing it for fifty plus years. They are an analog company that didn't get into the processor business until comparatively recently. I'm sure a bunch of this cloak and dagger around datasheets is legacy holdover from an analog sales world. They know what they are doing in that department, without doubt.

As to why they're DMCA'ing someone for a 50 year old datasheet - I'd guess it's as simple an explanation as someone in Legal carrying out their boss's mandate. Nothing more, nothing less.

The datasheets are under NDA because they give each volume customer a different datasheet. You go to a sales call and say you want X, and then their engineering department prepares a datasheet saying that their product supports X. (Obviously the hardware supports X, but it may be kind of broken, so it's easier to tell customers that don't ask for it by name that it's not there.)

An excellent point.

Alternatively, some customer pays an absurd amount of money to add Function X to the chip, and pays a premium to be the only customer who can use Function X.

What makes you think it's the OSHW community? If TI will work with you only if you're high vol then I could see a lot of smaller businesses seeing this tactic working against them too.

In TI's eyes - that is, through the lens of order volume and support needed by the customer from TI - the difference between a single small business building HW and a single OSHW is negligible.

They get way more ROI by heavily supporting bigCos who will give them millions of dollars of business YOY rather than helping a zillion mom and pop shops who can barely wire a resistor the right way.

Think of it as a tacit strategy of "firing your worst customers". Having worked in bigCo vs small Co, there are a lot of small Co and OSHW EEs who barely have a clue what they're doing. It's not worth TI's time or money to help these people out. Upleveling lousy engineers thru support only to net them a 10 piece part order, is a really lousy ROI. (Unless of course we're talking an ASIC or some other astronomically high ROI custom piece. But, I'm assuming that we're not, because I don't work for a military prime contractor.)

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