They might not need to open-source it: hackers have found ways of jailbreaking the installed Linux and are stepping up efforts for making it reusable. It’s a rather feeble SoC, so there won’t be a huge number of applications for it, but there will be some.
The comment over on hackaday pointing to it being bricked possibly being down to font licensing is funny if true
Yeah, coming from someone who’s tried it, the jailbreak is sorta useles at the moment. Hoping someone comes along and improves on it. Spite is an excellent motivator.
Would make for a lovely home assistant control device.
You should still get a refund, they should not get to do this.
DOOM thing
Honestly it would be cool to have it just able to clip to my vent and show me my now-playing or let me select episodes of podcasts or w/e
Are they making customers mail them back? They’ll probably go for $20 plus shipping if not.
I really want a second hand one to use as a Plex controller, would be awesome for controlling my speakers in the home.
“We can’t open source Car Thing because we used someone else’s copyrighted code to make it and we we not allowed to do that, or we don’t want to follow the license” - Blemishify, probably.
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.
Didn’t think about that. Thanks
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.
I think this is likely going to be true unfortunately, but I also feel like the title is more than a bit misleading. (The title at Ars is identical to the title of the thread here)
I didn’t see anything in this article indicating that Spotify has made any direct comments on whether they were going to open source it or not. From the article, it also sounds like refunds haven’t been publicly stated as the official solution from spotify, but instead just something some people have managed to get spotify support personnel to approve. In fact, it’s stated that Spotify specifically ‘declined to confirm’ that refunds were the official solution.
For reference, I bought my Car Thing for about $50 in 2022 and was able to get 3 months of credit for my family premium plan ($17/mo x3 = $51), so in essence a complete refund.
As much as it sucks to lose the Car Thing, I’m happy with this outcome at least. Anyone recommend a good replacement for an older car?
I ripped out my old radio and put one that had apple carplay. Was annoying to install but worth the effort.
Seconded. Only downside is that you might need to replace part or all of your dash where the radio goes (because many radio designs are proprietary and aren’t a standard double-DIN bezel), and possibly get an adapter if you have any steering wheel controls like volume or skip. It can be a little involved, though generally the instructions are quite good if you buy from someplace like Crutchfield, or use YouTube videos explaining how to remove and replace the parts.
How did this connect to your car and Internet? Literally anything with blue tooth support will work with a smartphone. If you need to go cheap then a cable and mp3 player can work.
Wait was this thing really just an extra control screen for your phone? Looking at their manual it connected to the car power, pulled information from the phone, sent the information back to the phone, and the phone sent the information to the car.
If that accurately describes what was happening then please just get a car mount for your phone.
It worked just as you described it, but having actual buttons helped use it in the car easier. The Car Thing was simply a remote control of sorts for Spotify using Bluetooth to connect to the phone. The phone itself is what connected to the Internet and your car.
I’m sure a phone mount would work, but I was just curious if there was something similar that others used.
That’s fair. And it’s ridiculous they want to brick such a simple device.
