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Comment by maxaf | Hacker News Reader

As a longtime Dropcam owner, I find this very unsettling. Truth be told, Dropcam service has steadily decreased in quality ever since the Nest acquisition. Not a month passes without an unexplained multi-hour outage; our mobile apps are randomly logged out every few days, requiring us to enter lengthy passwords while nervously wondering what that motion alert might be about. One day the whole Nest rigmarole will become inconvenient for google and poof - our $200+ camera will become yet another paperweight.

My only hope is that FOSS will become an option for these devices. There have been examples[0] of Dropcams getting rooted, so perhaps not all is lost here.

[0]: http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/04/reverse-engineering-...

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How long, as a practical manner, is google required to run these servers? Until all the devices die? 3 years? 5 years?

Don't get me wrong, I'm with you. I think 4 years from sale is reasonable though. Whatever the commitment is, it should be on the packaging, and it would be nice if the various state and federal consumer protection laws were applied here.

There should be something on the box or in the associated paperwork. Think "frustration-free service terms", similar to Amazon's frustration-free packaging. I shouldn't have to dive face-first into reams of legalese just in order to figure the half-life of my newly purchased gadget.

"Forever" is definitely not the answer I'm looking for here, but there should be a date, and preferably a DIY way forward for those of us who're technically inclined and have stocked up on sufficient amounts of elbow grease. This could be accomplished similarly to the Parse sunset: the service won't run anymore, but here's all the stuff you need to get it going, good luck! I'll take that over the seemingly imminent paperweightization of my camera.

I think the business model of "selling things" may be out-of-date at this point, and instead we'll see companies giving away hardware that requires that you subscribe to a monthly service to use it.

A number of old-economy businesses already do this, eg. razors, printers, car leases, apartments. Kinda ironic that this comes on the heels of the "ownership society" though.

Long time coming.

I read The Goal and its sequels in the early 90s. The struggling fictional businesses were turned around by transitioning from production towards service oriented business models. Very out of the box thinking at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

I really enjoyed the books at the time. Not great literature. But very thought provoking.

EU consumer protection laws give you an implied 3 year warranty, so I that's a good start a suppose.

To align business interests, I'd probably like to see something like "3 years free service included, after that a subscription is required" so that customers are an asset rather than a liability.

In addition, everything should have some kind of use without a cloud mode, even if it's not fully featured. E.g. Dropcam should revert to a basic USB webcam in lieu of a cloud service, if only to reduce the amount of electrical waste we're producing. Ideally firmware signing keys should be released when a product is EOL'd, so the open source community can pick up the torch.

If I remember correctly Federal regulations require hardware manufacturers to support their product for 7 years after production end.

To put it bluntly, this is what you get for buying a device that relies on a remote service. You have to expect it won't work forever.

Once you give up control to someone else you have no say.

Remember the good old days when the Dropcam had a practically-magical Bluetooth 4.0 config process and when the Dropcam Pro was sold as a 1080p device? Then Nest acquired them, released the Nest camera which was basically just the same device as the Dropcam Pro repackaged but with 1080p enabled. Oh, and they made configuring the Dropcams a total pain requiring plugging it into a USB port and executing some random executable. Fun.

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