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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Why are they required to release those datasheets?

They're not, but it's been common practice in their industry for decades, and it's generally seen as beneficial to OEMs and users to have access to datasheets before purchase. This is why it's also commonplace for most chip manufacturers to offer free samples, even of chips upwards of $20 list price. Most of them even publish enough information to develop hardware and software to interact with these chips even without one on hand.

That Broadcom doesn't do this is very atypical.

Ok. I find it rather rude to call a company 'assholes' for doing something that is 100% within their rights. They're releasing a chip that powers a relatively cheap fairly powerful computer, have supported the effort in as many ways as they could without giving up their competitive edge (when you're in a leadship position it is sometimes quite risky to open up too far), nobody forces anybody to buy the product and lastly you can of course always fire up the disassembler and do it the hard way.

You are 100% within your rights to not tip at restaurants in the US and yet I believe most people would consider you an asshole. If someone does something that benefits themselves at the expense of others when it's socially assumed to act in another way, many would call a person an 'asshole'. Seems like a similar situation if it is normal practice in the industry.

I think aswanson is simply expressing his feelings. Broadcom has garnered goodwill from being involved with the Raspberry Pi foundation. Goodwill, I must add, from a broad swath of people who are not too technically inclined. Yes, the computer (or device if you're lacking generosity) is a god-send for those without the capacity to buy an Intel/AMD-based PC, but let's not kid ourselves: the device is less open than a PC was even 20 years ago. Which begs the question, in what capacity is the foundation moving computing forward? That's where I lose goodwill even for the foundation. Sure, they did something special, that really made compute affordable. But that was years ago. Now they need to make it open, so anyone, not just students, can answer probing questions about how the device works, and in so doing be able to make a Raspberry Pi device, or something totally different, for a whole new generation.

All this said, if you want cheap and software open, go with the Odroid C1 (China really is the future, and in this case a Korean firm is acting as the intermediary to Chinese silicon.) And if you want fully open, TI's Beaglebone. Good, solid, open, American.

The Odroid C1 uses an SoC from Amlogic, which is also American.

Mea culpa. I see their SOCs on all these Chinese media-boxes that I just assumed they were Chinese. How did an American company break the Chinese market like that? Impressive! I should do research on who's running that ship...

> All this said, if you want cheap and software open, go with the Odroid C1

According to http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php the Odroid C1 uses a Mali-450 MP2 GPU. This is at least as closed as the VideoCore IV used in the Raspberry Pi.

So is it possible to get an Odroid C1 from Hardkernel now? I put in an order for one in December, and they canceled my purchase and said they stopped shipping to the US due to reports of missing packages. They said to order from ameridroid.com, which isn't served over HTTPS, and when you get to the checkout, you're taken to https://04622216-5b1d-11e4-8b60-14feb5da1938.mysimplestore.c....

"We designed our storefront to be indistinguishable from something resembling an sslstrip attack in action" leads to an "I guess I'll have to do without, then" response.

Whatever they are or aren't doing on hardware openness, Broadcom are doing a lot for open software with the Pi platform. That's quite a lot there, anyway.

Dead on. Those pricks cost me about 5 weeks of progress at a startup because they didnt provide drivers for linux or a register set, much less a description. All because some clueless hardware guy used their chip because it was 'pin compatible'. Unless you are Apple or Dell, do NOT do a design with their chips.

When somebody pulls a dick move that they're totally entitled to pull, they're being an asshole. When they're not entitled to, we call it a crime.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what a disassembler has to do with datasheets?

I think he means that if no datasheet is available, you can try to reverse engineer it by using, say, a disassembler.

But a dissembler doesn't produce the same information that a datasheets provides? Unless he means to physically disassemble, but that isn't very easy.

Indeed. But perhaps enough to write an (incomplete?) open source driver?

I can see how you might think that seeing as how a lot of manufacturers in the low cost and hobby markets are quite liberal with their datasheets . but it is not uncommon in regards to the higher end soc companies like marvel,qualcom or in this case broadcom.

"Low cost and hobby market" companies like Intel, TI, NXP etc..?

they aren't required, but without it, the few hobbyist trying to make Linux work on it will have to devote 10x hours instead of x. that is all fine for broadcom. but you're doing a disservice to those developers and to you by supporting and popularizing this board, because if you supported a open one you would now have 10 chips with Linux support instead. or some other feature you are waiting or something so cool and futuristic that you can't even imagine will never happen because those folks were doing the tedious task of supporting a closed platform that unfortunately became popular.

They're not required, but (thankfully) we're not required to use hardware from vendors that don't do that.

There might come a point where essentially nothing on the market is open anyway, however. Meaning we are required.

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