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.
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?
get real