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0 pointsderefr3y ago0 comments

I wonder why companies don’t just donate dead projects “to the community” more often: find a volunteer maintainer willing to take the project on; get them set up with ownership rights over a clone of the project on a non-corp-internal SCM; ensure all branding and IP is stripped from the project; and then just walk away. Link to this “third party” effort when anyone asks for support, mentioning that it is unsupported.

0 comments

fragmede3y ago

Licensing. Especially when hardware is concerned. Google, big as they are, don't own the rights to NXP or especially Broadcom's IP, and so they can't.

IntelMiner3y ago

Google (in theory) isn't making any more of these controllers, nor updating the firmware anymore

Surely there's no clause that says they have to perpetually license old firmware binaries?

kalleboo3y ago

If they want to perpetually distribute old firmware binaries they have to perpetually license them

jacquesm3y ago

Because they are risk averse and there is no possible upside so they eliminate it completely to avoid any possible downside.

awill3y ago

if the update was just an executable, it wouldn't require maintenance, just hosting. They chose to have the update use a webservice. That's on them. I'm not mad about it. I use Linux, so I was able to update my controller on Chrome/Linux. I expected to need to borrow a Windows computer.

solarkraft3y ago

It costs money and doesn't gain you any (when you don't consider the probably significant good will).

vineyardmike3y ago

1. Google probably uses IP owned by the chip manufacturer (nxp).

2. Google, famously, uses a “monorepo”. One of the perks of this is that it allows a significant amount of code-reuse. They may not want to commit to sharing all the internal libraries they’ve built.

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