actually, it really is not neccesarily a 'hardware company' thing. ive been in 'hardware companies' where the rtl was just as available for viewing as the rest of the firmware/software.

in big hardware companies, things start getting siloed, but that probably has more to do with big companies (seemingly invariably) operating as a union of fiefdoms (dunbar-number-ification?)

I'm not op but I don't think op meant to shame, I understand the construction "tell me you're... without telling me" as a way to highlight that something is unexpected to people who haven't done something, that is that something is particularly unintuitive without some special experience.

> It's insane that the source code of ANE is not available even to the MLX team

no it's not insane - it's completely mundane policy. that's my point - that you're calling something out as insane with exactly zero experience (which is the actually insane thing...).