Scared of hard work ?

Posted Oct 18, 2010 0:38 UTC (Mon) by dmag (guest, #17775)
In reply to: Scared of hard work ? by amimjf
Parent article: HTC Willfully Violates the GPL in T-Mobile's New G2 Android Phone (Freedom to Tinker)

> Data sheets are almost always very good in my experience.

You haven't worked on enough ARM chips recently. These companies get a well documented ARM core, throw some custom peripherals on it and forget to document all the possible interactions. (Sharp, I'm looking at you.) I won't even mention the engrish in the datasheet, since I expect that nowadays.

> but unless there are FPGA's or ASIC's hiding certain parts of behavior

Today's modern ARM chips have so many functions per pin (always at least two, sometimes four) that the configuration code might be more valuable than a circuit diagram. even without an FPGA

> the engineers at HTC have done all this once so anybody else with a similar level of skill can

It sounds like you are saying "engineering and reverse engineering are the same effort." That's not even close to true.