It's funny how people say that Qualcomm was founded by engineers, since given they way they have acted in recent years, I had always assumed that they had been founded by lawyers.
I know Broadcom is no prize, but given that Qualcomm has laid off all of their kernel engineers working on the upstream kernel, and given the "quality" of their BSP kernels I have had the displeasure to have to work with (hint: one way to tell that your drivers are not upstreamable is when your BSP kernel doesn't even _build_ on x86), speaking purely personally, it's hard for me to shed a tear for Qualcomm....
Yes, it was. If you're talking about Irwin Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi, Franklin Antonio - yes, these were/are true, hardcore engineers at heart.... that was the impetus and backbone of Qualcomm. Everything that follows is the effects, which are far less interesting than its beginnings.
At many companies, the Founders push their biases into company culture so strongly that it stays for a long time. For example, my sister (who is an accountant, although now she's a director in the Finance and Auditing department) works at a company in the insurance industry that was founded by folks in Sales --- and it shows. Previously, she worked at Motorola, and that was clearly run by engineers. HP and Digital Equipment Corporation are also companies which have their engineering founders bias engrained into corporate culture for a long time. Although HP's more recent CEO's have not been engineers (for example Fiorina was a salesperson, and look what she did to that company).
But Qualcomm certainly seems to behave as if the Lawyers dictate all of their decisions, which has made me wonder if at least one of their founders was a lawyer.
Regarding the lack of upstream work, a former Qualcomm VP told me that the major reason they minimize any open source work is that their lawyers are paranoid that any accidental IP leak might endanger their patent-related revenue streams (80% of their pre-tax profits are from patent licensing). Given that patents are public information, I'm not sure I understand the exact logic there, but I've seen this general kind of legal paranoia play out before.
Their non-Android Linux BSPs are especially bad since they're frankensteined together from a subset of their AOSP tree with their only concern being to meet the minimal requirements of some high-volume customer contract.
The Android AOSP android-common kernel tree builds just fine on x86. The Qualcomm Android BSP 3.10 kernel didn't, and I had to do a huge amount of bashing and fixups before it finally could build on x86 (at least with a minimum configuration so I could run file system regression tests, since this was before android-xfstests[1] was a thing).
I know Broadcom is no prize, but given that Qualcomm has laid off all of their kernel engineers working on the upstream kernel, and given the "quality" of their BSP kernels I have had the displeasure to have to work with (hint: one way to tell that your drivers are not upstreamable is when your BSP kernel doesn't even _build_ on x86), speaking purely personally, it's hard for me to shed a tear for Qualcomm....