The Sigma Designs copyright is the due to the on-board SoC, it is proprietary hardware around the microcontroller. If WD were to spin a chip with the same capabilities, it would probably be way worse than Sigma as it is not WD’s specialty, nor does WD have a history of evolution of the hardware.
As for Alpha Networks, well, the main package is Linux. Alpha Designs changed or added to the code so they must contribute the changes to the community. For all we know Sigma Designs ported embedded Linux to their hardware for a reference design and Alpha Designs was an early adopter, developing OEM hardware, not necessarily this hardware.
The reason so many boxes look alike is that they all started with the Sigma Designs reference design, as it had the most feature rich foundation for what they wanted to do. Then extra features were added by each company to differentiate the product from all others based on their own market research.
Yes, they could have contracted out the design as well, specifying that they needed something that does x and y.
Time to market is critical. If you expect or think that other companies spin their hardware from scratch, you are grossly mistaken. Most designs of any complexity are based on reference designs from the core hardware vendor.
Asus, WD, et. al. are trying to get a segment of the market. For WD it complements their storage products, for ASUS, it complements their PC’s, etc. . For Alpha Designs, they may have decided to design a box that would be rebranded, not necessarily by WD and Asus.
If all these boxes were made from Alpha Networks I’d expect more similar and more mature features, seeing Alpha Networks specializes in that market.
Sometimes doing the OEM thing is cost-prohibitive, especially when profit margins are small due to competition and possible market saturation. You can look at the hardware and say it costs 30%-50% of the sticker price, but then there is development cost, packaging, support, etc. that slowly eat away the profit margins.
Purchasing from an OEM with customization of the software/hardware can have higher up-front costs, which push ROI too far into the future, with short product generation life, it can be a total loss. Spinning the product from a reference design can be much cheaper in the short run.
Companies can’t survive if a few products are their primary products, especially when competing with larger companies like WD and Asus.
Again, if Alpha Designs is OEMing the product, there is still much the add on to the product due to the limited horsepower and flash space in the product. It can’t be a jack-of-all-trades from them, you have a limited number of features that can be added in the firmware before you run out of space or horsepower. The extra features cost extra. Even if they don’t charge up-front for the extras, feature cost amortization within the first couple of years can lower profit margins to unacceptably low levels.
When developing the product, it’s a good to have a budget on upgrades, etc. Bug fixes should be included in the price tag, but extra features are dictated by how may units are sold. If the product does not hit certain sales numbers, management has to make tough decisions, to walk a fine line between investing more with smaller return or alienating too many customers. If they can determine that a feature will sell more, then it becomes easier to budget for that feature. If it’s only existing customers that are asking for the world, then it’s a loosing proposition.
If it was only that easy.
