Could it be a legacy culture thing? If you’ve ever dealt with traditional broadcast vendors it’s the same thing there, impossible to get even basic documentation and manuals without having an authorized account in most cases. Really is frustrating when you try to shop around for a new setup and all you can get is marketing material.

On the contrary, this is not legacy, it is a new fashion.

The electronics and computers industries have been built initially based on free detailed documentation from all the manufacturers of components.

When I was a student in electronics, I learned more from datasheets and application notes than from most university manuals.

All companies continued to provide good technical documentation until close to the year 2000.

With the growth of the Internet I believed that it will become easier than ever to get technical documentation, as it could be now downloaded instead of having to get printed copies.

Unfortunately, at the end of the nineties a lot of negative tendencies have appeared. Many large electronics companies with decades of successful histories were split (e.g. Motorola, Siemens, Philips and others) and their successors seem to have lost most of their previous experience.

A large number of other electronics companies have started a descending evolution and, sooner or later, between 2000 and 2020, they were bought by competitors, so now only a handful of US non-fabless manufacturers of semiconductor devices have survived.

At the same time the incomprehensible fashion of requiring Non-Disclosure Agreements for getting the complete datasheets or even any datasheets has become more and more widespread.

This policy of the NDA has been conceived by morons who have not the slightest idea about how an electronics product is designed.

Whenever I design a new product, I need first to be able to read all the datasheets of all the products that might have even an extremely remote chance to be useful, to decide and select what I could use.

I will not bother to sign an NDA to learn about products that might be not useful at all for me.

The only positive effect that the NDA may have for a producer is that it might prevent the already existing customers to redesign their products, because they might not bother to obtain similar NDA from other vendors. On the other hand requesting NDA's will deter many potential new customers, especially due to the insistence on providing an estimated sales volume, before signing the NDA.

That is stupid, because before seeing the information under NDA I have no idea if I would ever want to buy 1 sample, much less 1 million pieces per year.

Managers seem much happier about NDA's than designers, because they frequently feel like they are some sort of special bond with the vendor and the information under NDA provides some sort of competitive advantage, but that is extremely far from the truth.

In most cases the only valuable information contained in the datasheets under NDA was about horrible bugs that required complex workarounds. If I had known about the bugs before the NDA, I might have never chosen those components, so maybe that was a desirable feature of the NDA for the vendor.

The end result is that when I was young and I designed anything, I could choose any component from a large number and I could easily select the best for my specific needs. Moreover, in many cases I could find a method to use in a novel way something that was not intended for my particular application, but due to the good documentation I could understand whether it would be good for different uses.

Now there is frequently just one remaining producer for any component, or if there are more of them, you might need to choose one by lottery, because without the information under NDA you cannot know who has the product more suited for you, and you can sign the NDA only if you are already committed to buy that product and not another.

> The only positive effect that the NDA may have for a producer is that it might prevent the already existing customers to redesign their products, because they might not bother to obtain similar NDA from other vendors.

That's a positive from their competitors requiring an NDA, not for they requiring one.

Anyway, large software sellers benefit a lot from stupid procedures from their clients that create a huge cost to start buying from a new supplier (like passing all suppliers through legal or having a management vote for them). If all hardware manufacturers require NDAs, they can force their buyers into creating similar procedures, closing the market for new entrants.

Most likely. The open source movement in software was still relatively recently and quite radical. The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past.

>The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past.

If only. In the past it was common to provide schematics of your hardware in order that people could repair it. This was common for consumer products, industrial, instrumentation, test gear, almost everything. For example, the manual for the Amiga 500 had the schematics in it.

Also "hardware companies are still stuck way in the past" is only true for some hardware companies. Recently got into music production and lots of hardware comes with schematics of the inner workings with descriptions on how it all works and is connected, together with implementation guides for MIDI and more. Night and day if you compare to how computer hardware gets sold today.

I don't know if this is only with music hardware or with 'professional' hardware in general, but yeah you get a lot of schematics and such.

While I was at University I made some money by repairing DJ-hardware. Controllers, CD-Players and Turntables. There things are often expensive, but they are quite easy to repair because there are detailed service manuals available. Not on the official sites, though.

“The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past.”

You wish they were stuck in the past. People like Steve Wozniak often designed new stuff only based on the manuals that back then had complete schematics in them. They didn’t have enough money first to buy anything but that information later on resulted in sales.

And in turn the Apple II manual included schematics and ROM listings.

>"The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past."

Example: in the past my friend bought Moog Prodigy synthesizer and along with everything it also came with all the electronic circuitry diagrams. Good luck finding anything like this with the modern hardware.

It's the same today I think. Recently bought a Moog Sirin (released in 2019, compared to Prodigy that was released in 1979[?]) that also comes with a circuit diagram. Couple of other synths I own does the same.

Last time I had to find in-depth documentation on a fairly common and new SONY image sensor, there was nothing available officially, found it in some chinese file sharing site though. Seems like they are shooting themselves in the foot by not opening it.

I think this may be some bigger market fixing situation - only big and already established corporations would get documentation preventing any competition to emerge.

They could easily control it by selling chips to big players only if they want.

I am not sure if that would be legal. Many countries have provisions against market fixing.

Stabbing a bit in the dark, but maybe TI wants to prevent a competitor from being to say "we didn't steal anything from you, we got all this info from sites that you were perfectly happy to let continue to operate freely".

The legal departments within companies have very, very different measures of success than that of just about anyone else. If you have weak company leadership, legal will start to drive policy more than it should.

> If you have weak company leadership, legal will start to drive policy more than it should.

That's a really interesting dynamic I have never experienced or heard of. Explains a lot! Do you know other examples?

(ed. clarify which part I wanted examples for)

Oracle is the example.

Because in semiconductor business land, not showing what your most cutting edge products are, and who's buying them, helps you develop business opportunities and product lines several years ahead of your competitors.

It's a very different game than Intel's business model, which depended on a pure performance play and being 18-36 months ahead of all competitors tech wise. TI's strategy requires way more customer contact and development, because analog applications are so much more specific.

It is to create barriers to entry where possible. If you are rent-seeking greedy co, then why would you give away useful knowledge, not to mention for free? Also good documentation could make you create a replacement product or have better understanding what to look for in a substitute.

Not really, they are only making it less likely that we use their chip in our product because we never tested it and can’t make a prototype with it.

I think that was my point. Smaller companies will not use these chips, but big co will have all the documentation they need.

In addition to the other answers, it is also a cheap way to do inbound sales. I've seen OSS downloads utilize this for the same reason.

> This only creates more problems for small developers.

This is exactly why: to stop small developers from buying them. There are three types of components in the electronics world to my observation.

1. Components for the general public (e.g. opamps, microcontrollers, power supply controllers) - the datasheets are publicly available. This is probably 70% of the marketplace.

2. Components for the OEM - Some components are only meant to be sold to OEMs in huge quantity. For example, a company may sell $1 LCD controllers, if such a company is only interested in selling to huge manufacturers for big money, they often classify their datasheets as "confidential" - it's a joke, the only purpose is stop small developers from wasting their time. Whether it's a Type-2 part heavily depends on the company. For example, a big U.S. semiconductor company may sell it to the general public, but a cheap Taiwanese vendor often classifies all the information as confidential.

3. Security through obscurity. If the chip contains unique or advanced technology, for example, the latest generation of NAND flash or SoC, the datasheet is classified to make it more difficult for other people to do market research. Similarly, the payment card and consumer DRM vendors essentially own the security chip industry, selling channels of the chip and availability of the datasheets are tightly controlled.

Type-2 and Type-3 are responsible for the most frustrating experience. If you are an independent kernel hacker who wants to port Linux to a new gadget, not being able to get the datasheet of the $1 LCD controller because it's "confidential" is a real headache.

But as I mentioned previously, Type-2 chips are not really secret - the confidentiality is only meant to stop small developers from bothering them. Thus, the chips themselves can usually be found for sale on the Shenzhen electronics marketplace, and it's often possible to find numerous leaked datasheets on the web. You can also reverse engineer consumer gadgets as a reference design. For example, Realtek Ethernet controllers, 100% of the public datasheets are leaked by insiders. If it's not, sometimes getting the datasheet may be possible you do some social engineering, "we are prototyping a new product based on the LCD controller chip, now our problem is register xxh..."

On the other hand, if it's Type-3, don't even think about it.

The vast majority of products by TI are Type-I: Usually all technical documentation is provided on the website, with schematics, PCB layouts, and reference designs (unless it's a specialized chip for a particular application). I recently used a TI chip in my design just because of the availability of documentation.

> Here is TI DMCAing a bunch of random datasheets. Completely jellybean stuff like 555s, 74xx logic, and op-amps. Nope nope nope nope. This is crazy.

These chips don't even belong to the Type-2 category. It's unreasonable to send DMCA takedown notices in terms of security-through-obscurity. The only explanation I can see is TI's overzealous corporate policies.

This is an exceptionally crisp explanation.

TI is great to work with on Type 1 chips. They're nowhere near the worst in the Type 3 category. (Looking at you, Qualcomm and Marvell.)

I totally agree that the DMCA notices issued don't make much sense, given this context. I just get irritated by OSHW folks acting like their business means something to TI. They are ants crying in the footprints of elephants.