> For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services may not be supported.
So.. they might need to rip out some problematic drivers, maybe? Like, imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative, you get to choose to continue updates but losing bluetooth as a feature.
The footnote continues
> See our Help Center for details.
So kudos to first one dig out the exact page they're referring to (there's no link).
> imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative
no, then you tell them that if they dont play ball, they will NEVER sell a single chip to anything google ever again, and then you hire some people to reverse engineer the shit, and make it work anyway. And then you publish all about how company X is being stupid and trying to work against efforts to save the environment, how they are trying very hard to make money on peoples hardware being obsoleted before time etc.
But then we realize that google themselves have bummed out to large extents with what they have permitted on android and chromebooks, so anything like this would not happen
Tell me you have never worked with hardware suppliers without telling me you have never worked with hardware suppliers.
Imagine that the part you want (given the constraints, etc.) has maybe two suppliers. You pick one of them and use them in your product. Then they drop support and you pull this stunt. What do you think will happen? People will storm the company with pitchforks and they'll quietly release their full source code and promise to never do that ever again?
No, what's actually going to happen is you're going to write a blog post, Hacker News is going to be like "yeah I worked with that supplier once, never again" and the average consumer is going to be like "who is this company?" and it will be forgotten by next week. Your reverse engineered drivers, which you of course spent millions of dollars on hiring top-tier engineers to make, will ship and the company will immediately sue you for infringement. Maybe if you did a very careful job you might be able to claim some sort of interoperatability defense and win the case years from now. Before then the court will grant an injunction preventing the sale of your device.
There's no need to tell the supplier that you will never work with them again. You've ruined the relationship already. And the other supplier? They probably won't work with you either, because they're doing the same thing and would like to keep doing it, thank you very much. Oh, you think you're Google so people will care about your business? They're selling 10x the volume to Samsung for their smart fridges. And now you get to I guess create an entire division to create a Bluetooth chip from scratch. By the way leadership wants to ship Pixel 9 on time so can you please have it ready by December? And it needs to support all the latest features because it would truly suck if Apple shipped Bluetooth 6.5 support before we did.
perhaps if it was something mega complex, but we are talking a bluetooth chip, hardly an unwinnable scenario for google.
are you saying for real that google isnt big enough to get its way with these things? they could buy these puny suppliers, piss on every desk in their offices, and close them down, just for fun if they so wanted.
and how come this "sued into oblivion" doesnt happen when the community writes drivers for linux in the cases where vendors do not play ball? are you saying theres absolutely no way google could pay money to make this happen?
Bluetooth chips are complex. That’s why the companies that make them are worth billions of dollars and have thousands of employees. Making a phone is also very complex but it would be exponentially so if every component had to be made in-house and not purchased from another supplier that is an expert in that area.
The way companies express their pique is that they try to aggressively poach engineers from the company to make their own in-house team, in a process that frequently takes years. All the time they continue buying chips because until that is complete they don’t actually have any Bluetooth chips to ship in their products. Even then the process frequently doesn’t work because it turns out that throwing a billion dollars at something doesn’t necessarily mean you can make what the other company has spent 25 years on. If you want examples, just look at Apple: they aggressively pull things they think are strategic into their own hardware team, and they still talk to a bunch of terrible suppliers because they aren’t willing to shell out the money to do it themselves and they don’t consider it worth going to war over. And the things that they do actually try to make (modems, for example) frequently don’t work out.
Nobody is going to sue a guy in his basement working on Linux drivers. You can scare him with lawyers but fundamentally there’s not much that you can extract from them. But going after Google for IP infringement in a phone that sold ten million units is actually very much worth it.
I think you feel that Google has infinite money to just use on tantrums and despite them having a lot of money their is probably no entity on earth that can engage in these kinds of things regularly and get away with it. Companies are not like people. Even the smallest ones have legal teams that can make engaging with them very painful. And in hardware people have a ton of options to sell to, so you’re just a tiny piece of anyone’s pie.
bluetooth chips are more complex than producing spoons, sure.
Google could EASILY do this, they just do not care. Nobody would come after them if they reverse engineered drivers for bluetooth chips.
but it would never come to that, they could just announce that bluetooth drivers now have to be open source to quality for play store shit, and it would be done. they have 1 million ways to get what they care about, they just dont
my source is that google/alphabet is in the top 5 biggest companies in the world, I consider it quite within the realm of google to decide to solve having open source drivers for some bluetooth crap. regular small guys can reverse engineer more complex stuff in their basement, google can fund that, or do it themselves, or outright buy the bluetooth companies should they want to.
my spidey-sense is telling me that a giant megacompany that dwarfs bluetooth companies could probably manage to solve this, and easily at that
Your spidey-sense is wrong, for the reasons I specified. It is not economical to do this. The effective way to solve open source Bluetooth drivers is with a carrot, not a stick, regardless of how satisfying it would be to try to beat bad companies with it.
Unfortunately, the supply chain often goes 3 and 4 levels deep. And by the time you get to companies that far in the supply chain, (a) no one has ever heard of that company, so the trying to threaten them with reputational damage doesn't really work (it will be some random set of chinese characters for a company in Shenzhen, for example), and (b) it will turn out that the team that wrote the device driver for that particular subcomponent in the SOC was disbanded as soon as the part was released, and 4 years later, half are working for a different company, and half were died during the COVID pandemic.
Sure, if you could set the Wayback machine back in time, and require that device driver be upstreamed, with enough programming information so it's possible to maintain the device driver, maybe it would be possible to upgrade to a newer kernel that doesn't have eleven hundred zero-day vulnerabilities. But meanwhile, back in the real world, very often there's not a whole lot you can do. So this is why it's kind of sad when people insist on buying Nvidia video chips that have proprietary blobs because performance, or power consumption, or whatever, instead of the more boring alternative that doesn't have the same eye-bleeding performance, but which has an open source device driver. Our buying choices, and the product reviewers that only consider performance, or battery life, etc., drives the supply chain, and the products that we get. And this is why we can't have nice things.
> For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services may not be supported.
So.. they might need to rip out some problematic drivers, maybe? Like, imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative, you get to choose to continue updates but losing bluetooth as a feature.
The footnote continues
> See our Help Center for details.
So kudos to first one dig out the exact page they're referring to (there's no link).