[Libre-soc-dev] 3d gpu business plan

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tuesday, December 29, 2020, Lauri Kasanen <cand at gmx.com> wrote:

> A giant like Mediatek will have volume licensing and ready suppliers in
> place, requiring no negotiation at all. Most things they'd have
> in-house.

Lauri: *it still takes 12 to 18 months*.  this is just how it is.

there is more.

what they won't have is the company's commercially confidential customer
list.

there is more.

additionally, the lesson that has been learned from what mediatek provide
is that for Western companies their GPL violating products are impossible
to use.

Mediatek fall into the ignorance of Copyright Law through the following
deeply flawed logic:

  "we have made one line of code change to a kernel config file this makes
the entire source proprietary therefore we do not have to comply with
copyright law"

consequently any Western company using Mediatek processors - not that they
can get datasheets let alone a Board Support Package - is taking a terrible
risk.

consequently i am not in the least bit "concerned" about China based
companies "taking our HDL".

they're not going to have our customers, they're not going to have access
to our expertise

the list goes on and on like this.


> It is a rather optimistic view that only a small player would
> bother.

the scale at which large players operate, they are simply not interested in
adding unnecessary peripherals in specialist markets that would cause them
to be unprofitable, trying maybe to take a 0.5% market that is not their
core business.

we are simply starting out "too small for them to try bothering to wipe off
the map" even accidentally.


far from viewing these larger players as "problems" we should WELCOME them
because their entry into OpenPOWER helps endorse what we are doing!


> I did not propose a solution because I do not have one. That does not
> mean I can't highlight a serious problem.

appreciated.  it's not a problem.  the market differentiators are so large,
and the specialist targetting of each SoC so different, that there is no
overlap.

and we are not going to provide them with our confidential customer list.
 we would be sued by the investors for doing that.

l.


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