Originally posted by Adarion
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- competitive issues; each vendor has strengths and weaknesses that balance out, but if you open up your strengths to competitors without having access to theirs in return then a couple of years later you can lose in the marketplace
- third party IP; there is some technology we have a right to use but not a right to publish
- DRM; we need to make sure we don't release information which could be used to attack the DRM implementations on other OSes -- this is probably the single most expensive part of the process since we have to model each of the likely attacks and determine the viability of each one
- patent litigation is a big expense for any technology company, particularly the "greenmail" type where a law firm will buy up a patent portfolio and then accuse companies of infringement in the hope that those companies will pay them to go away rather than incur the costs of a legal battle - if releasing specs triggers even one more case that's a huge cost
- the preparation and processing of patent applications takes a long time; while those are in the pipe you need to be really careful about what you document and publish
- preparing and reviewing the specs to consider all of the above factors takes a lot of time from our most senior technical people
Originally posted by Adarion
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A big part of the spec-writing job is sifting through literally thousands of pages of hardware design documentation, picking out the portions which are relevent to outside driver developers, and distilling that down to something we can actually release to the public.
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