From Gongkai to Open Source
bunniestudios.com
bunniestudios.com
Probably the best way I’ve heard it described.
>You do have to read or speak Chinese to get it
This statement kind of bothers me. Mandarin is great- loads of fun to learn and speak. My problem is that I meet a lot of highly skilled professionals who don’t do more in China because knowledge of Chinese is often held up as an “obvious” prerequisite. I have met countless people who move here and waste a year with flashcards instead of making things because they are convinced that being bilingual will make them successful in China (hint: it won’t). Investing your time in doing things the Chinese can’t do very well will make you successful in China- and there is no shortage of bilingual Chinese.
You can get the Mediatek MT6260 (or just about anything else) without speaking Chinese, by using Google/Baidu/Bing Translate and relying on the spectacular patience of Chinese people for these things. Will it be a little embarrassing? Sure. Should you learn Chinese? Of course- but should you give up on doing things in the amazing development environment of China just because you don’t have a gift for languages? Certainly not.
That being said- Bunnie is the Man
Would be a very long post, it depends in which cities, and which age groups (there is a huge cultural gap with far more risk-adverse older Chinese who grew up during the Cultural Revolution) and generalizations are always a bad idea.
That being said I’ll take a stab at it- usually Mainland Chinese are not so great at problem solving, but they are fantastic at making the solution better and cheaper (idea Iteration over Genesis). There’s the expression "别在孔子面前卖文章” roughly "Don't sell your essay in front of Confucius” akin to our "Don't try to teach your Grandma to suck eggs”. Coming up with something new- or imagining you can carries a certain air of arrogance to it. This does not let itself to encouraging creativity. While this attitude has obviously led to accusations of China just cloning products, it’s also made many Chinese to be enthusiastic proponents of Open Source (although not contributors for the above reasons). So new solutions and creative problem solving will likely be something they rely on foreigners and overseas educated Chinese to do for some time.
Software, UI/UX, marketing and outsourcing are still comparatively weak. Nearly everything is C++, Java and PHP with only a tiny sprinkling of other languages. Programmers are held in fairly low esteem and not terribly well paid.
Service at one point was a weak point but in the past two years has started to pull ahead of the West significantly. Aliexpress is the tip of the spear as far as Chinese direct sales posing a threat to Western businesses and it’s service is not even close to what you can expect from Taobao.
I would disagree a bit about what makes us different, or what Chinese can't do well. Creative independent smart local hires or experienced international savvy local hire managers exist, but there are not so many of them yet (the supply is not well developed), so why not bring in a foreigner who is easier to find? After that, diversity is still important; something we take for granted in the states.
That what I've always thought too about why it's often much easier to find complete datasheets for Chinese components than Western ones - at some point, someone leaked them to the public, but the company either doesn't know because they're not the type to send lawyers after everyone, or knows and doesn't care because it's a sort of implicit advertisement.
I have an unbranded Android device based on the MT6589, and the buying decision was influenced partly because I could relatively easily find the full datasheet for it ("MT6589_HSPA+_Smartphone_Application_Processor_Datasheet.pdf", in case you're curious) along with lots of other very detailed information including schematics.
The availability of a large number of different phones based on the same SoC/reference platform has also lead to a big repair ecosystem - Bunnie has written about this before: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=283
I also have an mt6589 lying around and would love to start hacking on it.
0 = http://pan.baidu.com/wap/link?uk=1647171434&shareid=240536&t... Its md5 is
dd9c04982c692e17e17d11cf389b1da0 MT6589_HSPA+_Smartphone_Application_Processor_Datasheet.pdfI'm French and these days I came to the point that I don't even bother to Google anything related to programming in French. I just Google it in English and now I find useful answers (thank you Stackoverflow).
I guess the wheel is turning and soon we will have to learn a bit of Chinese to access fresh knowledge. The barrier of entry is higher though (it doesn't even involve the same parts of the brain than other languages).
Except for companies like Alwinner (which isn't "western" by any means), most of the documentation is in English but getting it is so hard we usually have to fallback to Chinese versions, which are shared more easily due to legal and cultural norms.
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/wiki/Session:LowRISC_Dis...
The whole GongKai ecosystem is fascinating. In pure Chinese pragmatism, it's messy, relies on the power of guanxi (the force that lubricates relationships), ignores outside-imposed rules, and is terribly effective.
Another example is gigabit ethernet- it has been around for 15 years, yet I still can't buy a gigabit-capable switch IC on Digikey. The part I need does exist but manufacturers either want $10k pre-payment before even giving at least partial documentation or the sales cycle is several weeks at best.
Realtek made the RTL8366/RTL8369 which have plenty of info available and you can get from Aliexpress for ~$20 each.
We were aiming for 3-port (2 PHYs, 1 MII) switches, and both Realtek and Marvel do make them (Realtek part is also available on aliexpress).
Designing commercial devices (even for small production runs) based on key part available only in grey market seems to be a slippery road. Unless you live in China and can talk to vendors about previous and potential future availability of the chips ;(
In my experience, Marvell is one of the worst to work with but their fabricators make a lot of grey market copies of Marvel's chips during off hours. If you can find a reliable source (fabricator who makes chips for Marvell during the day and grey market copies during the graveyard shift), it will usually be pretty reliable.
Thus empowered by our fair use rights, we decided to
embark on a journey to reverse engineer the Mediatek
MT6260. It’s a 364 MHz, ARM7EJ-S, backed by 8MiB of RAM
and dozens of peripherals, from the routine I2C, SPI,
PWM and UART to tantalizing extras like an LCD +
touchscreen controller, audio codec with speaker
amplifier, battery charger, USB, Bluetooth, and of
course, GSM. The gray market prices it around $3/unit in
single quantities. You do have to read or speak Chinese
to get it, and supply has been a bit spotty lately due
to high Q4 demand, but we’re hoping the market will open
up a bit as things slow down for Chinese New Year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8770732
Bunnie crystallizes terms where we can begin to see a response- while the "why hard" author contemplated the traditional Western unidirection flow, Bunnie characterizes a loose network not of product co-development and impacts to bottom-line, but comprised largely of support and availability. The Gongkai model makes available means and platform, rather than providing the conventional expected of open source: development.
Thanks as ever Bunnie not just for the hard work and amazing worklogs, but also for helping pull together good framing to help answer "why oshw is hard" with.