Often, these include code that they don’t have the rights to publish.
Comment on Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes
Engywuck@lemm.ee 2 months ago
What about open sourcing stuff, instead of making it just “unsupported”?
catloaf@lemm.ee 2 months ago
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I feel like 99% of the time that’s just a lazy or misleading excuse. I’ve worked in proprietary software development for 25 years and I’ve never worked for a company that didn’t avoid restricted third-party code like the plague at all times. In the few, rare cases when we did have to use some proprietary third-party licensed library, it was usually kept very compartmentalized and easy to drop out of the code specifically because we were always afraid the other proprietary code vendor could fuck us and jack up their prices or find some nasty way to make our lives difficult.
The excuse that there is some secret but legitimate third-party code they’re not allowed to share simply doesn’t hold water in the vast majority of cases.
More likely answers are that some beancounter somewhere still imagines that the proprietary source code could possibly be valuable in some hypothetical future acquisition (nonsense of course) even though it has no real commercial value, or fears that it could expose the company to liability if some security flaw or licensing violation is found (more plausible).
Ironically, perhaps the most likely reality for this resistance is that the software actually includes code that dictates they were actually always obligated to publish the source but never did. ie, GPL-based code. GPL violations are all too common in proprietary software and very few organizations have codebase governance effective enough to keep the situation under control with developers copy-pasting from anything they can find on Google. Releasing their plagiarized GPL source code would reveal to the world that they were not in compliance all along. Let it quietly die, and nobody ever finds out and they get away with it. It’s not simply that they’re embarrassed by bad code, it’s that their bad code will potentially incriminate them. Not worth the risk, and sometimes it’s not just a risk it’s a certainty.
The proprietary software industry relies on open source so much and rarely gives much of anything back. I’m fortunate that the company I’m working for now actually takes licensing seriously and does contribute to open source projects to some degree, although I keep insisting they need to do better.
Schorsch@feddit.org 2 months ago
They did that with their Squeezebox range of media players.
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Yeah, lms is still going strong!
otacon239@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But that would take woooorrrrk 😤
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 2 months ago
Not much work really, but few companies want their spaghetti code seen publicly.
otacon239@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’d imagine any company open-sourcing their code has to go through a pretty decent amount of re-written routines. Nvidia has been open-sourcing their drivers, but it’s been taking forever. I can only imagine how complex commenting GPU firmware must be.
dan@upvote.au 2 months ago
It’s been taking forever because they’re moving a lot of code into the firmware to keep it closed source. It’s essentially a brand new driver that takes advantage of newer firmware. That’s one of the reasons the open-source driver only works with Turing (2000 series) and newer cards - they don’t want to spend the time updating older firmware to handle the open-source driver.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Or you could just winamp it.
Oh, wait, that’s a terrible idea.