Capitalism sucks sometimes.
(This is why, for example, when I hear that Ubuntu edge, which can't even sell 45,000 phones, will "try" to come with free drivers, i laugh)
That said, one of the interesting "advantages" that Samsung and Apple get here is that they are their own SoC vendors. Google will have to get into this game eventually.
Both Apple and Samsung heavily use Qualcomm products. The Samsung S4 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600. It should say something when Samsung isn't using it's own Exynos for it's premiere flagship device. The S4 also features a Qualcomm 4G LTE modem. And a Qualcomm power management chip. And audio codec.
The iPhone5 is almost as Qualcomm heavy itself, too.
I think Samsung and Apple would have equally as difficult of a time trying to release binaries (or source) as well, regardless of who is designing or assembling the SoC!
Google could certainly tell LG/Samsung/HTC that a condition of getting the next Nexus deal is that all binaries must be able to be freely distributed by Google and let them put pressure on the SoC vendors, but I doubt the Nexus line sells enough or drives enough profit for anyone to take such a threat seriously.
The same thing would be true if it sold a million units.
Google could always use chips only from vendors that allow redistribution of the blobs, make it a contractual requirement when commissioning Nexus devices.
Mark Shuttleworth said this in his AMA: "In future generations, it would be great to see if we can do an all-open device, for example." -- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...
"So in this first generation Edge, no, we didn't look for open hardware specifically. We can choose silicon with more open drivers as we finalise the spec"
If you assume that they're doing something that they haven't claimed to, then you can continue laughing at nothing, I suppose.
Sure sounds like "we'll try" to me
Capitalism would get along just fine without patents and copyrights. No one likes to admit that though.
But capitalism works based not just on what you can produce, but what you can withhold. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem: if anyone can hit a "clone chair" button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers. Perhaps spare-time activity or alternative business models would supply the necessary labor, but it's iffy: see the never-ending battle between open-source and propietary software, which I expect will persist long into the future.
Believe me, I'm in favor of a free global library of all intellectual and creative human output, which algorithmically rewards all creators proportional to their results (or alternately, a society wealthy enough to subsidize its creators such that incentives aren't as necessary). But that represents an enourmous technical and political challenge, to say the least.
You contradict yourself once here. You say capitalism is based on what can be withheld. Another word for that might be scarcity. In 1932 Lionel Robbins said "Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." This is still the modern mainstram definition of capitalism.
Then you say: > if anyone can hit a 'clone chair' button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers
The idea that value comes from the labor of chair makers is a Marxist idea. You are making a Marxist argument here. It also contradicts your first argument. You say value comes from scarcity (modern mainstream economists agree), then you say value comes from labor (which is what Marx said) which contradicts the first argument.
You're trying to make a Marxist argument for capitalism (Actually Marx did make an argument for capitalism - he said it was better than feudalism and slavery, but that's not what I mean here).
You should go on the web and read about the subjective theory of value, and then about the labor theory of value. You argue STV in the first sentence and then LTV in the second. They can not both be right, their definition of value is contradictory.
I should note you're not the first person I see making this error. As things become digital they lose their scarcity. I see all kinds of odd statements come out of this. You're not alone in this. But across the entire political spectrum, from far left to far right, all serious students of the economy agree only one side can be right, value comes from either subjective marginal/scarce/utility reasons or from a certain type of labor, but it is either one or the other. You flip back and forth between a capitalist-supporting argument and a Marxist argument. A Marxist argument for capitalism. I see this more and more, and I find it odd.
The quote there appears to be defining "Economics", not "capitalism".
I'm curious about this: when did Capitalism stop meaning "the opposite of cottage industry" and start meaning "a market with limited regulation"? Was it Marx that introduced this?
What you describe also occurred/occurs in Cuba, and that's not a capitalistic regime.
"When the competition starts using your own improvements/innovations against your products, and they are not moving a single finger to push innovation, you are obliged to keep the secret."
I don't mind if the competition improves my work, this is more than enough incentive to push innovation forward, but when the competition stalls and makes a verbatim implementation of my work, or worse enough, depends solely on my improvements to stay relevant, I honestly prefer to keep the secret to myself. I don't want parasite competitors, I want talented competitors.
I think it's pretty tricky to consider that a real 'effect', as if the alternative companies kept secrets then it would be just as bad.
Not saying I've got a better idea than capitalism, but I wouldn't consider it ideal.
Patents are a good idea, it's the current implementation that sucks
But they would be thwarted by license agreements making the drivers generally nonredistributable?
Do you morally and ethically agree with the position that Qualcomm should get paid a licence fee for the firmware for each and every resale of a particular chip? (vs the spirit of the first sale doctrine)
At the moment, it seems that you're giving tacit approval to this position.
I think it's reasonable to sell the chips under a restricted license - you don't expect people to use the chip in a product you don't know about. Consider a metaphor using a collection of short stories. You include your story in an anthology, which lets the buyer re-sell it at will. However, it would be questionable for the buyer to remove your story, and re-bind it as part of another book, which they then sell.
These actions are not restricting the actions of customers in any way (as far as I know), so they seem ok to me.
Edit: sorry about the delay in reply!
I suspect there are a lot of professional Engineers working on products that will ship fewer than 10M units. Sometimes these Engineers then go on to design products that ship more than 10M units and prefer to keep working with the chips they know. Sometimes those Engineers are 'hobbyists' too.
Modern SoCs demand thousands of pages to cover all available features and possible applications, and putting together that documentation in a self-consistent way is a challenge. Some vendors have decided that supporting low-revenue clients is not worth the cost of putting together said general-purpose documentation and providing support to each and every buyer. They'd rather not sell you the product in the first place than sell you something and stiff you on documentation & support, which is a reasonable position.
Often when you're a low-quantity company you deal with low-quantity vendors who are willing to support you. When you move to high volume you might prefer to keep working with the chips you know. But when your operations guy comes back to you and says that the Big Co (who wouldn't talk to you in the past) can sell you chips for $5 less, that's $50M you just saved (given your 10M unit quantity). So you switch. In this example you have two different vendors: high cost / high support, low cost / "exclusive" support. Both have markets, just different ones.
TI is an example of a vendor that is very hobbyist / small quantity friendly. Even that wasn't enough to save them - they've pulled out of the phone SoC business.
But most of the population is uneducated in that regard. Blame the lack of enthusiasm for FOSS.
We in the west are overfed pigs standing on the backs of billions.
The problem, to me, is more of a logistics problem, because once you get more than ~100 people in an organization, you start losing the immediate connection with them, which means you care less about their well being, because you don't know them. The issue is managing people, and meaningfully punishing ne'er-do-wells.
Leninism worked, we know for a fact that it worked, at least until Stalin took over and made it something worse that ultimately didn't work.
I don't think that [nor am I inclined to think did Marx]. I think capitalism exacerbates it drastically to a markedly negative effect (though not so negative as say malevolent dictatorship). Moreover I don't perceive inequality as detrimental, it's a truism that none are equal after all.
However I do certainly have communist beliefs about the best forms for society to adopt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals#Pr...
In fact, imagine how far we'd be if great minds weren't restrained by having to pay rent, or work around mainstream stupidity, or having to use cheap equipment, or facing patents and other laws created to protect the captalists.
Just because we've never seen a working communist country, it doesn't mean it could never work - to think otherwise would be luddite and ignorant.