Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report)

Posted Oct 10, 2006 18:09 UTC (Tue) by ca9mbu (guest, #11098)
In reply to: Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report) by arjan
Parent article: Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report)

Sorry, arjan, I didn't mean to come across as thinking it's "easy" at all. It's hard enough for me to write proper documentation for the code I write. I can't imagine what it is like to have to document hardware, never having been involved in that field. My question obviously shows that lack of experience, I guess. It just seemed ironic that the documentation is only being released under NDA, but being used for software that was obviously going to be made public, hence the information it contained would be disclosed, albeit in a slightly different format.

Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report)

Posted Oct 11, 2006 9:51 UTC (Wed) by broonie (subscriber, #7078) [Link]

Sometimes you end up with things like implementation details of the chips that the vendors don't
want too public mixed in with the documentation on how to program the chip, especially if the
manual isn't really intended to become public but the need has come along over time.

You can also find that a vendor with NDAs with other people or with secret information of its own
will have some sort of process in place for auditing released manuals to ensure that they don't
have that sort of information leak even if it's not likely. Releasing under an NDA may allow that
process to be streamlined.