Letter to the Editor [LWN.net]

From:		"Andrew Stuart" <astuart-AT-mira.net>
To:		<lwn-AT-lwn.net>
Subject:		Letter to the Editor
Date:		Sun, 21 Mar 2004 02:21:18 +1100

To the Editor,

I have started a grass-roots campaign aimed at convincing IBM to open up and
free the programming documentation for its STB (Set Top Box) series chips
http://www-306.ibm.com/chips/products/digitalvideo/products/settopbox.html .
You can find the campaign home page at
www.users.bigpond.net.au/mysite/freestb.htm

My personal outlook is that the documentation and drivers need to be freely
downloadable to encourage people to develop. Developers have to be pretty
motivated to embark on a quest to engage with an IBM reseller to sign an NDA
and eventually get access to the documentation. IBM, Microsoft, Sun and all
other software companies are very open with their software documentation and
programming documentation for software API's, but why not hardware?

I'm not sure what the origin is of the practice of hiding chip documentation
behind an NDA. Surely companies like IBM don't think that an NDA would in
some way keep them one step ahead of the other chip manufacturers?

I think such information hiding is a relic of the days of proprietary
computing and chips haven;t felt the wind of open source, so to speak.

This is a sub $100 TV connected Linux machine which uses an STBx25xx chip
http://www.hauppauge.com/html/mediamvp_datasheet.htm
Here are the hardware specs of the Mediamvp machine.
http://www.shspvr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=19411

Also http://www.netgem.com/ has an STB chip.

This forum shows people who are trying to build their own version of linux
to run on the MediaMVP http://www.shspvr.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=38 I
think life would be much easier for these people with full documentation and
drivers available.

Projects like this would benefit from public and free access to the
documentation and drivers.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mvpmc/

I'm hoping to spread the word and build public pressure on IBM to address
the issue. Any help that you might be able to give would be appreciated.

Regards

Andrew Stuart
astuart@bigpond.net.au

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Letter to the Editor

Posted Mar 25, 2004 20:57 UTC (Thu) by kcannon (guest, #4867) [Link]

I don't understand: while documentation would be nice, isn't the source code available? The Hauppage box is running Linux. Do they refuse to provide the source for their kernel?

-Kipp

IBM's STB Chips

Posted Mar 30, 2004 0:29 UTC (Tue) by crouchet (guest, #1084) [Link]

I would guess that they may be using some methods on their chips that are not covered under patent but by using an NDA they can claim that they are "trade secrets". That, in turn, forces other companies to take the long way around and use clean room methods to reverse engineer the functionality of IBM's chips so that if they end up in court they can prove they did not copy IBM's design.

What does IBM get from all this? A few more months to sell their latest greatest chip designs before someone comes out with a functional clone and the price starts dropping.

This may not even matter on the particular chip(s) at which you are looking but being standard company wide practice it gets applied to all chips (or all chips younger than a certain age, etc.).

I have no direct knowledge of IBM's partcular legal practices so all this is just a guess but I doubt it if far from the truth.