Comment by tredre3
15 hours ago
> It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?
Onavo is correct: Qualcomm are extremely notorious for aggressive IP enforcement. They're the Oracle of hardware. In particular they held critical CDMA patents which were required for making a modem which worked in the US.
They (along with Intel) also ended up making most of the non-Apple ARM chips, which are not competitive with the Apple ones.
Imagine NVIDIA on steroids. Think bad documentation, opaque code, and everything being locked down. The customer gets squeezed for more money (especially egregious if you don't have enough scale they won't even bother engaging).