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Comment by nrp | Hacker News Reader

We’ve opened the specs specifically to avoid this scenario! The information we have up on GitHub today is enough to get started on module development, and we’ll share any additional information that is useful to enable third party board makers.

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My concern is more about business than technical factors. The NRE for such a module is going to be significant so the addressable market needs to be pretty big to justify it. Third-party modules could also get killed off by first-party ones that come later.

Third-party modules could also get killed off by first-party ones

I think it is pretty clear that Framework intends to allow you to buy the most barebones laptop you can. I mean they let you buy 0 of the little cartridge modules, I assume they won't force people to buy one of these PCIex8 modules.

I mean if some company is selling, say, a Radeon 7600 module and then Framework comes out with their own "official" 7600 module then the third-party company is toast.

Alternatively, that means Framework doesn't need to spend resources building their own version, or acquiring a company that makes one. It's to Framework's benefit that they don't compete with module vendors. They just need to let the vendor list them in the official marketplace and promote them as a success story for the modular laptop concept.

With this in mind, trampling module vendors doesn't seem like a great idea. What's the point of creating an ecosystem if there's nobody around to participate?

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