Yeah that's quite fair, the article is not very accurate.
It sounds like there are two main pieces to me:
1. Removal of cloud dependency
2. Making usable the API (and providing documentation)
With a minor 3rd piece:
3. The official app will be updated to support the "offline" mode without losing as many features as possible now that the cloud service is going away.
All very laudable things IMHO. I'm actually going to buy one of these
Those APIs have already existed. So it is probable that they already had a documentation.
Sanitizing an existing documentation for public release might take notable time and effort if there are 100s of endpoints. But I would assume that is not the case with an API for a speaker.
The soundtouch web api which is what was "open sourced" was already an existing thing for a long time. You just had to access it from the bose developer portal I think. I don't think anything actually happened here. I'm so surprised that HN is excited about this story because nothing seems to have been released.
Firstly, the source code is probably being used on newer devices, so Bose would not like sharing their proprietary solutions which might contain thirds party code they cannot share.
Secondly, these devices are basically one step above embedded. It's highly unlikely you can load and run anything custom on them.
Since they are opening up the API, you can keep using them for what they were made for, which is at least a solid basic liberty
I admit that I expected more. They really did the minimum, as in, anything less should have been illegal. It is praiseworthy, but it is unfortunate that it is.
Seeing that, I expected the ability to build and run a custom firmware, like with an Android device with its bootloader unlocked. But it is not that, and they didn't open source their app either.
What they did is that they removed dependence on their servers, and opened their device to be controlled by third party apps. That is, they let users use their device past its end of life, including when the first party app will stop being maintained, but not to the point of letting user add features.
In understand why they would do that, they don't want users to backport features only available on their latest models that are sold at a premium, therefore competing against themselves. After all, the value in smart speakers is not the sound producing device, which I think is a problem that has been solved more than a decade ago at the consumer level, it is all about software features.
Yeah, it's kinda sad how much applause this is garnering when publishing API specs should be bare minimum for any smart device, never mind EoL concerns.
Don't let perfect be the the enemy of good. I fully agree with you on what the bare minimum should be, but the reality is that our definition of bare minimum is currently a fantasy. Any steps taken toward our vision is good and should be applauded IMHO. Especially when it's a major player like Bose that hopefully sets a positive precedent and gets other manufacturers to realize this is not only possible but leads to applause and hopefully more sales.
Evolution v. Revolution. I'd prefer the latter, but realistically the former is the more likely to succeed short of people like us getting control of regulatory bodies and forcing it.
Unless you want to actually develop ON the device (and build binaries etc...), this completely allows you to use the device and connect it to whatever, so I don't know what more we should expect.
Open sourcing the server code would make getting your own instance of it way easier, and maybe opening the app code so people should change the controls?
I owned a couple XPS 13 laptops in a row and liked them a lot, until I got one with a touch bar. I returned it after a couple weeks and swapped over the to X1 Carbon.
The return back to physical buttons makes the XPS look pretty appealing again.
This is exactly what I was hoping to see. I also returned one I ordered with the feedback that I needed physical function keys and the touchbar just wasn't cutting it for me.
The person who posted both this blog article and the hacker news post, is Matthew Prince, one of highly technical billionaire founders of cloudflare. I'm sure if he wants something to happen, it happens.
Something I love about HA is that all thr gui can always be directly edited using yaml. So you can ask claude for a v1 then tweak it a bit then finish with the gui. And all of this directly from the gui.
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