Neil wrote:
My company is an electronics manufacturer in a different industry and we would never give out schematics or software information. It’s naive to expect anyone in the real commercial world to do so.
Maybe for not what’s inside the device, but it’s entirely reasonable to give out installation schematics, or information on how to configure/use the product. Do you not do this?
For example, I’m currently working with a microcontroller based on an ARM M0 core. While the manufacturer isn’t giving out internal device schematics, they freely and liberally make a very detailed datasheet which documents in great detail what all the peripheral registers are and what they do, drive strengths of pins, rise/fall times etc. Furthermore, ARM themselves have highly detailed documentation on how to use the core, full descriptions of all the instructions and their effects, detailed documentation on standard peripherals such as the NVIC etc. etc. Not only that, ARM do a lot of work supporting freely available development tools under a software libre license so I can be confident that I’ll always have access to a compiler, linker, assembler etc. (compare this to Peter’s experience with Xilinx). The microcontroller manufacturer also has a development board which has full schematics, plus they make schematics of various application circuits freely available. They helpfully provide a bunch of example code under a software libre license which you can use to build your products with the chip.
Garmin doesn’t even publish simple examples for installing and configuring a GTR225 which is a plain COM radio. I was fortunate enough to find a leaked copy of the installation manual. That’s what really gets my goat, that they expect to have you over a barrel even for straightforward things like simple COM radios.
alioth wrote:
Maybe for not what’s inside the device, but it’s entirely reasonable to give out installation schematics, or information on how to configure/use the product. Do you not do this?
In the energy production industry we deliver equipment guarantied to last for at least 30 years, sometimes 40 and 50. We never hand out source code, but always schematics, diagrams and drawings. The industry code specifies the function, interface and high level requirements, not the internal design of things (which software is). In the nuclear business things are much more strict.
