Broadcom Bids To Snatch Qualcomm For $103 Billion

[MartinN]

More mega corporations throttling competition, sounds great!

Only if you compete on their terms, yes. You can always build products or service atop their framework(s)/offerings/products, and sell that, or you can always take a risk and do something radically different that solves some pain point, even if it's for a few customers and go from there.

It's not like competing with multinational conglomerates like Qualcomm or Broadcom is something most anyone can do...

[MartinN]

ComComm

QualBroad. The new whorehouse on the block.

[kaprikawn]

I'm inclined to think this might be a good thing. Generally, I'm against mergers and consolidation. But Intel being as big as it is, and the R&D budget that comes with that, has gave us the Core2Duo and then 3D transistors which has made the X86 architecture punch well above it's weight. I'm not oblivious to the bad old days of the Pentiums, but at least we had the Athlons then, and we're long past that era.

Also, while Broadcom's support of OSS could be considered weak, just hiring one guy and giving him free reign to hack on a Mesa driver has given us VC4. You never know, an acquisition may open the doors for Eric to do something similar on Qualcomm chips. And if none of this happens, I don't think we're losing anything here, it's not like Oracle buying Sun.

[starshipeleven]

This sounds like it would prevent any hope of officially open-source ath10k firmware. The Qualcomm Atheros subdivision [has released open-source firmware](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...tem&px=MTMyNTY) in the past; I don't see a single driver with open firmware from Broadcom.

The hope of having an open firmware disappeared when Qualcomm bought Atheros and the main proponent of opensource in there went away. Now they have a open driver only because they had an open driver even before, but they added the blob to hide their IP stuff.

[madscientist159]

Broadcom is one of the least FOSS-friendly companies I am aware of. They bought LSI and promptly broke the existing control utility (with source available online) via firmware for the LSI SAS controllers. Thanks to these constant mergers, if you want a modern SAS controller you have to use both binary firmware and binary control utilities *as root* on the afflicted systems.

No, this is not a net win, this is a massive loss for the FOSS community. Also, I think you can kiss non-crypto-locked ARM boot firmware goodbye after this one for any reasonably performant cores.

/rant

[brad0]

Broadcom is one of the least FOSS-friendly companies I am aware of.

NVIDIA is 100 times worse. There is no comparison.

[aht0]

NVIDIA is 100 times worse. There is no comparison.

Nvidia is active more or less only on PC GPU market.

With QualBroad, what have you got left for alternatives on markets it would cover? Not much.

[torpcoms]

The hope of having an open firmware disappeared when Qualcomm bought Atheros and the main proponent of opensource in there went away. Now they have a open driver only because they had an open driver even before, but they added the blob to hide their IP stuff.

But that source code was released after the merger, the normal ath9k chips don't need any firmware at all (according to Wikipedia). Can you point out the blob in question? Would you still be able to use the old firmware before they added such a blob?

[torpcoms]

NVIDIA is 100 times worse. There is no comparison.

But at least Nvidia does not make many CPUs. And their graphics cards do not have network access. Proprietary shenanigans that cannot be airgapped are a bit more worrying.

[edwaleni]

They just smell blood in the water with Qualcomm. Apple has already dropped Imagination and they are picking up a scent that Apple is about to drop Qualcomm for radios. (half of iPhone X radios shipped are by Intel)

Qualcomm has become an IP terrorist and hasn't done as much innovation as of late in mobile but ringing in licensing fees from everyone's grandmother. That is why you see Qualcomm moving to partner with Microsoft on the Snapdragon 835 and Windows. It's also why you see the new Qualcomm ARM Server CPU's getting pushed harder and harder. They see the end of the mobility cash cow and Broadcom is picking up on it. Samsung has already designed around Qualcomm and outjuked them into the market.

The sharks are circling. Look for layoffs at Qualcomm as they attempt to fend them off.