Spotify won’t open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

misk@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 355 points –
Spotify won’t open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
arstechnica.com
38

You are viewing a single comment

Refunds cost Spotify money. Open Sourcing is free. This is an epic level of dumb.

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.

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.

Plus knowing how most companies operates, there are all kinds of secrets, API key and others in the repo that needs to be thoroughly removed before releasing to the public.