Refunds cost Spotify money. Open Sourcing is free. This is an epic level of dumb.
People underestimate how much work open sourcing something acrually is. Not trying to defend Spotify, fuck Spotify, but open sourcing something isn’t free.
Honest question, why would it cost money?
The code may contain some proprietary things they want to remove. Maybe it’s not up to public standards and they don’t want to be looked down upon. Maybe it could reveal vulnerabilities in other code if not cleaned up.
There could be a lot of reasons.
Maybe they don’t have 100% of the rights to the hardware in order to open source it? I don’t think they made this hardware in house. They would have had to outsource it.
Unless the code in car thing exposes vulnerabilities or potential exploits in Spotify. Even the potential exposure may not be worth the risk to them.
my money is on Spotify violating licensed open-source code in Car Thing, which would be revealed if they open-sourced their code.
I think this is likely going to be true unfortunately, but I also feel like the title is more than a bit misleading. (The title at Ars is identical to the title of the thread here)
I didn’t see anything in this article indicating that Spotify has made any direct comments on whether they were going to open source it or not. From the article, it also sounds like refunds haven’t been publicly stated as the official solution from spotify, but instead just something some people have managed to get spotify support personnel to approve. In fact, it’s stated that Spotify specifically ‘declined to confirm’ that refunds were the official solution.
“We can’t open source Car Thing because we used someone else’s copyrighted code to make it and we we not allowed to do that, or we don’t want to follow the license” - Blemishify, probably.
They might not need to open-source it: hackers have found ways of jailbreaking the installed Linux and are stepping up efforts for making it reusable. It’s a rather feeble SoC, so there won’t be a huge number of applications for it, but there will be some.
What’s SOC?
System on a chip. Think like a Qualcomm or Samsung processor, or the new M line from Apple
in other words, the cpu
For most intents and purposes
SoC is from the embedded system development world - as more and more coprocessors were being put into the same chip to consolidate board space and power efficiency, it wasn’t “just” a cpu - it had the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and other coprocessors in one
x86 has moved a lot closer to this architecture over the years, but you still generally have a separate chipset controller on the motherboard the CPU interfaces with
Yeah, coming from someone who’s tried it, the jailbreak is sorta useles at the moment. Hoping someone comes along and improves on it. Spite is an excellent motivator.
Would make for a lovely home assistant control device.
You should still get a refund, they should not get to do this.
DOOM thing
I really want a second hand one to use as a Plex controller, would be awesome for controlling my speakers in the home.
The comment over on hackaday pointing to it being bricked possibly being down to font licensing is funny if true
