I can't really say because it would make it obvious which debugging tool I'm talking about and that would out me. And then the company could put 2 and 2 together and find out who my employer is and... you know, our orders might become slow or mishandled, that sort of things. My company's entire business depends on that one supplier, so it wouldn't be good.

Sometimes people in OP's situation don't say too much information because they don't want to jeopardize their professional relationship with the other party.

This one is kind of the same thing: it's a bone-stock FTDI 4232H probe with a bit of logic tacked on to disable the chip without a custom init command and a custom USB PID/VID. All I need their driver for is to enable the chip. After that, I can just use the open-source FTDI driver. But the driver makes everything super-slow, so the point is kind of moot anyway.

Probably another attempt to go around the GPL actually, because they use the FTDI driver to talk to the chip (because the open-source libusb is very slow in Windows) and that too can't be linked to the GPL debugging tool. So the probe masquerades as a custom device.

It's rare that the business would give them the slack to be able to, usually there's plenty of intent

GNU was founded because Richard Stallman was frusterated with a printer's proprietary software.

I can't sadly. It would make it obvious which company I'm talking about, and if ever read this thread, they could retaliate against us.

Spending 20k to unchain yourself from a clearly ill-meaning vendor can be seen as a good investment in itself. 5k saved in (recurring) fees is a bonus.

Lol.

May be those fees are annual licensing fees. And who knows what else is tied to that (support contracts, etc)?

I once enabled my company to forgo a license renewal of $10k...after 3 months of heavy work. Not really a big savings. But it also then eliminated an annual $1 mil in servicing fees that they would've had to pay for 10 years, by contract (so saved $10 mil). That we didn't know when I started.

You assume I'm paid 20k per month when I'm paid a lot more than that 🙂

Anyway, not to worry, we'll recoup that money next year when we won't have to renew our license for the 10-so development machines.

Yeah, but this is (according to OP) faster, which saves money. And, because it's open, if there are features that could add serious value, they could be added in-house.

But yeah, perhaps a bit of a pyrrhic victory.

The particular open-source license doesn't matter: they're doing all they can to not release their source code and that's what I need to fix their stuff.

I posted what I could legally post on my Github, and I made sure it's easily discoverable. If you need it, you'll find it very quickly.

I have no reason to keep it for myself or my employer, since it's GPL. Also, I kind of like the idea of distributing what the unhelpful company I got it from only gives upon request: when they do that, they comply with the GPL, but in the most unhelpful way possible. With what I posted, nobody has to request that stuff ever again, and I cleaned up and updated their code too.

They already know. I've posted all the good I think of their device, as well as the author of the open-source debugging app that runs on it (it's actually a generic device), on their official Reddit sub. But it's just a general comment, not tied to this account of my little GPL adventure.