MediaTek

“Seriously, fuck Mediatek. They don't give a shit about open-source, yet they have the nerve to charge developers for using their kernel sources or something.”

~ Kit Kittredge on Mediatek

“We supply beef, they create the dish.”

~ David Ku on their company's business model

MediaTek Inc. is a Taiwanese semiconductor company, best known for producing system-on-chips, processors and application platforms used on el-cheapo cellphones, tablets and whatever consumer electronics people use.

Mediatek's solutions comprise of turnkey, off-the-shelf components and software - with this business model, the lads and lasses at MTK do most of the dirty work while all the client has to do is to come up with their own customisations and bloatware. Among the cellphone community, they basically earned a bit of infamy for supplying small, backlot "Shanzhai" firms with the necessary tooling to churn out counterfeit phones or glorified paperweights.

Their stance with Android is also an issue, and was viewed with cynicism and acrimony from open-source developers due to their refusal to comply with the GPL. This, however, has changed when the company collaborated with Google in 2014 for their Android One initiative, resulting in the release of kernel sources for their MT6582 system-on-chip (SoC).