Normalize mandatory open source when a product is no longer supported. Either we pay for a service and they Replace it free of charge or we own it properly
- stop e-waste/ longevity
- Breed innovation
- Foster community engagement
- Boost educational value
- Improve compatibility and interoperability
- Empower user customization and flexibility
If it needs someone’s cloud servers to function, you don’t really own it.
We need consumer protections here, though.
Like 10 year money back guarantee or something. If the device becomes unusable due to actions outside of the device owners control, those in control should be obligated to reimburse.
Not doing so opens the doors to racketeering.
Not doing so opens the doors to racketeering.
That’s the idea.
I mean I haven’t seen it yet but for a simple example, imagine a Netflix competitor that says you just buy the device for $5,000. One time purchase. Free ad-free tv forever.
Let’s say they get enough
subscriberspurchasers to profit by year 3.Okay. Rug pull. Chapter 11. Sorry bye, thanks for all the fish.
or just install a rootkit on users’ computers …
I vote for forced open sourcing of the server side components and communication protocols. That way people can create custom firmware or build support into generic NVRs
Most customers would not be able to take advantage of this because they lack the skills to do so.
You don’t need every consumer to roll their own. If they’re obligated to provide server code, or an API, or whatever, stuff that sells at scale can be integrated into community projects. If you buy something obscure you might have issues, but you have options if you buy something mainstream and get the rug pulled.
Right, but what I’m saying is how many people do you think will be able to track down the new open-source project and connect it to their hardware?
Word does spread and if there are enough of a group, people will likely setup 3rd party hosting solutions around supporting abandoned abut functional products.
But the secondary effect is likely to be that companies support their products for much longer.
If companies do that then it’s useful. Otherwise, open servers is a good thing, but is only a true solution for smart home hobbyists.
Because if the community solutions are good enough then half the articles about the shutdown will mention it
Wow, Google discontinuing something? Breaking news, unprecedented
I’ve been thinking about writing my own security cam software that would let you use any WebDAV provider and just a Raspberry Pi with a camera. I’ve gotten better at packaging stuff for Docker. All the big company security cameras have huge drawbacks.
The only problem with my thing would be weather proofing. I don’t know of any waterproof Raspberry Pi case that can take a camera. :(
Having a weatherproof case made wouldn’t be too much issue. Let me know if you go ahead with it and maybe I can do the case.
Cost wouldn’t be feasible for 1-offs, but any volume orders and the price for the cases would come straight down.
I started working on this yesterday.
https://github.com/sciactive/soteria
Locally, I’ve got it loading the stream from the camera, encoding, and muxing, then pushing to a filesystem write stream, but I’ve discovered software based encoding in single threaded WASM is just too slow for what I’m trying to do. I’m going to rewrite it today to use FFMPEG externally for encoding.
