Thank you for your very thorough response to my rant, appreciate the insight - particularly the explanation why it is so rare to see mobile data modems in laptops (which to be honest leaves me even more enraged at the patent model).
However, I do disagree on some points:
> They pay the people doing research for the standards on a "for exposure" basis[3]: they get their patented inventions in the standard, and as payment for their work, they get to charge a $2/unit royalty on every user, which they can then pour into research that yields more patents.
The problem at the core IMHO is that Western nations removed themselves from R&D financing following the end of the Cold War, and instead large corporations and foreign nations moved in that had other interests in mind than the common good.
> Every time they try someone says "I own this, here's your royalty bearing RAND license", and the standard is dead in the water.
There used to be at least three competing patent pools for h264 and HEVC (until Velos Media disbanded). That even the largest commercial standardization enterprises like MPEG could not make sure that there was at least exactly one consolidated license shop just shows to me how nuts the entire patent situation has become.
> But at the same time, cellular radio technology is quite possibly the worst thing to leave to amateur[5] software development. There's a lot of very expensive lab tests you need to do to make sure the technology works, to ensure hundreds of devices can communicate with the towers without jamming each other, and to ensure each one of those devices isn't pumping the user with shittons of radiation. There's a lot of boring research and regulation needed to make radio work at all, it's not something that can be hacked together in a weekend and collaborated on over time.
Actually it can. Fabrice Bellard (yes, the same person as ffmpeg and qemu...) wrote an entire 4G/5G tower implementation that he currently sells via his own company, there's a FOSS project implementing the core services for a 5G network [2] and I think Osmocom has also made some progress in getting some sort of client side support.
Yes, the interop and jamming concerns are still valid, but those with enough brains to work in this field in the first place generally tend to know WTF they're doing - and commercial efforts definitely have the resources to properly work without endangering anyone.
The telling thing for me is that there is virtually only Qualcomm and Mediatek around who sell high performance modems, in addition to Samsung who mostly keep their stuff reserved for their own phones. Where's Apple? Where's Broadcom? Where's anyone to compete with Qualcomm's extortion tactics and Mediatek's IMHO embarassing code quality (just look at one of their Android BSP packages and the kernel patches they do)? For me, this state of the market shows that there is something seriously broken, and given that Apple has more cash on hand than entire countries' GDP and some of the most capable semiconductor engineers in the world managing to kick the arses of behemoths like Intel, the only explanation is the patent minefield.
And I'd like to address this as well:
> Which has resulted in a number of "ubiquitous" OpenGL extensions that aren't in the standard solely because they cost money to license, but can be accessed through de-facto standard extension names
Yet another very fine example how the patent system that was supposed to further innovation actually stifles it.
The system is completely broken.
[1] https://bellard.org/lte/
[2] https://open5gs.org/