This is a product that didn’t need to be built. Since it has, I’m at least pleased there are efforts to keep them from being relegated to landfills.
I feel like there should be a law to release the bits we need to support these efforts.
Too many times a product will die or a company will fold along with all its documentation.
Maybe release a final firmware opening up a product. Or at the very least a git repo with api documentation.
Well it’s two situations. Look at Google dropping the older Nests. There you can lay in a fine.
For the folding company could make it part of declaring bankruptcy. Standard paperwork.
Either release all your source or prep the needful. Once this is common and expected could even force companies to maintain a public branch to release on cue.
Owning IP is fine. Products ending up in a landfill due to software is not.
Hopefully the law also expands to actually owning all of a product you own. Not paying BMW to unlock the heated seats already in the car you fully paid for.
There should be efforts to ensure it never happens again. All companies who abandon products or services should be forced to open source all associated code.
Why should greedy narcissists be allowed to waste humanities finite resources on their limp dick get-rich-quick schemes and failures?
I don’t care too much when it comes to early adopter tech like this, which everyone knows will be obsoleted and laughable in 1 year. But the biomedical devices - we need a law about this, so people who get sense-restoring tech implanted in their bodies don’t get bricked because the company decides the product isn’t viable to bring to mass market.
Philosophically agree with you, and would love to see it okay out exactly as you say.
The problem with incorporating a business is that all humans therein pretty much escape liability.
The only value is the assets and intellectual property that can be sold off to another organization. Releasing all the proprietary data brings that value down to zero.
As usual, our addiction to market capitalism means the world is pay-to-play, and the risks will always remain higher than you or I would like or need.
If you bought this e-junk in the first place you’re kind of a moron.
Why?
This is the question that should’ve been asked before it was built and shipped.
Now that it has been, though, any effort to keep it out of landfill and find a use for the hardware is good.
But why
It sounds like they’re trying to do whatever they can to replicate the previous functionality, but without the company who made it getting in the way, the hardware itself is kind of interesting. I hear the battery life sucks and nothing on it is exactly novel, but I’d be interested to see what people could do with it’s fancy display options combined with everything else.
The hardware itself had a glaring flaw and that was that it would overheat every 5 minutes and even be uncomfortably warm on it’s wearer.
i thought this thing has serious production issues… like battery problems that might not be solved by open source software
HP shut it down, so it’s effectively a paperweight or trash otherwise. Judging by the image of it sitting on a desk in a 3D printed enclosure, I’d say they’re probably not using it for its original purpose anyway. Pretty easy to solder in a bigger battery if you’re not trying to walk around with it.