I see a lot of products like this on Alibaba that I wish I could put my own firmware on. I've messaged a few of them telling them "I'd buy 1000 of these if I can put my own firmware on them" but haven't gotten any good responses. What I'm aiming for sometimes gets lost in translation, but mostly I think they just don't get the premise I'm presenting to sales people who answer the Alibaba inquiries.
A lot of the seller in Alibaba are just buying camera OEM from a factory so they wouldn't be able to get you the software. The factory itself might be just copying the reference design from chip manufacturer and they might not have access to the code or under a NDA. The chip manufacturer does not have an incentive to provide you custom firmware. You aren't their customer.
These are exactly the same reasons which prevented mp3 players manufacturers back in the day from opening up their specifications to open source projects, such as Rockbox
Yes, it's notoriously difficult to find who actually makes the hardware for these devices! let alone who writes the firmware. Many cameras are much too hard to reverse engineer in order to run your own firmware.
Fwiw, I recall that this is exactly how Dropcam started: they reverse-engineered the firmware for (iirc) an Axis net cam, then provided their own.
