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The source code has zero business value to Google at this point – they have another smartwatch OS and there's never gonna be a business case for a company of Go
by hayleox 2y ago
The source code has zero business value to Google at this point – they have another smartwatch OS and there's never gonna be a business case for a company of Google's scale to revive a niche product like this. Releasing means getting free PR on Hacker News and a free morale boost for employees who care about this kind of thing.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y agoIsn’t it valuable to Google to keep potential competitors from getting expensive IP for free? “PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Reproducing that for new hardware would take a long time.” [0] [0] https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back
- refulgentis 2y agoIt's 12 years old. They put good work in. But it's missing an absurd amount of stuff the mass market considered mandatory a decade ago. Consumer electronics, for better or worse, is mostly about spending enough money to get your product name in front of hundreds of millions, and Google knows that well.
- The_Colonel 2y agoI don't think Google understands hardware given its lack of success in it.
- kfir 2y agoThe lack of success in hardware is intentional. Hardware is a low margin business that will hurt their bottom line.
- aryonoco 2y agoWhen did you write this in 2005? Apple would like a word with you.
- The_Colonel 2y agoRight, like this world's largest company called Apple, which gets most of the revenue from its hardware sales. Pixels are not cheap either and given its low specs (Tensor SOC), the per-unit margin has to be quite decent. OTOH, there are significant fixed development costs which you want to spread over as many devices as possible to increase the net margin. The lackluster value and sales of Google hardware is no master plan, it's a simple incompetency.
- refulgentis 2y agoNo, it's not
- jmathai 2y agoGoogle does not do this for PR on Hacker News. It also seems improbable, maybe heroic, for one L6/L7 SWE to push this through.
- arghwhat 2y agoYou'd be surprised by how much PR specifically targets a certain audience. Converting a zero-value IP into low impact positive PR has business value. Making MS-DOS sources public falls in the same bucket.
- addicted 2y agoAnd the opportunity for a shit ton of lawsuits. Source code like this doesn’t just have no value for Google. It has negative value. It’s a massive liability. That’s why big cos simply bury source code instead of releasing it in the open.
- adastra22 2y agoLiability for what?
- zinekeller 2y agoUnrelated to smartwatches, but the usual reason that I've heard on why video drivers are not open-sourced directly (AMDGPU =/= AMDGPU PRO and Nvidia's recent parallel driver efforts) is that there are copyright (old code that is not written by ATI/AMD or Nvidia/3dfx and AMD/Nvidia not getting the rights to it) and patent (techniques used may be patented by their competitors) concerns.
- adastra22 2y agoFor that to be an issue here, there would have to be revenue from the Pebble line of products. Otherwise how would they show monetary loss?
- arghwhat 2y agoThey have had revenue as pebble sold their smartwatches. Acquisition includes liability. You do not need revenue to be liable though.
- adastra22 2y agoThe statute of limitations is 3 years for copyright infringement and 6 years for patents. The plaintiff would have to show actual financial loss due to the infringement. In the case of the pebble assets, that seems exceedingly unlikely. Generously assume for the sake of argument that the entire codebase is a straight up copy of Samsung and Apple’s IP. What damages have been caused by that IP sitting dormant on Google’s hard drives for the past six years?