Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

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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.

>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.

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.

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