Posted Jan 29, 2022 10:24 UTC (Sat) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Not a Collabora employee, but have worked in tech firms a long time; lots of software consultancies (and Collabora is a consultancy) do a certain amount of work paid for out of their profit margins on paid jobs as a form of advertising their own abilities.

The point for Collabora is that much of their paid work will be under NDAs, and thus they can't show it to potential customers. The work they do out of their own profit margin is not under NDA, and thus can be shown to potential customers. This blog post is a perfect example - Collabora is paid to provide a driver with full source for some ARM Mali GPUs to a customer under NDA. If we knew which SoCs were involved, it wouldn't be that hard to work out who the customer is - but that's something Collabora can't let out of the bag due to its NDA. By working on Mali drivers out of its own funds, too, Collabora has a set of examples of how it can produce Mali drivers for any SoC of interest to you without putting itself anywhere near the customers with NDAs.

This is important to potential customers; they want to know that Collabora is able to respect the NDAs it signs, and they also want to know that Collabora can do the job they want to hire them for. If Collabora was only able to show off SoCs it did drivers for under consulting NDAs, then there's a good chance that Collabora customers under NDA would be identified, which is bad for Collabora's business. If it had nothing to show off, then how do I convince management that Collabora can do the job? Hence paying out of profits to ensure that sales can go in with something I can show management, and that doesn't give their existing customers' legal teams the heebie-jeebies (which is bad for maintaining relationships).

Rosenzweig: Writing an open source GPU driver – without the hardware