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Comment by fivre | Hacker News Reader

"the big players are already fuckers, flaunt the law, and will eat competitors' lunches if they don't do same" seems a rather sad outlook. if we can't ask companies not to be horrible because their predecessors are already horrible, and that we should instead just permit everything after to ramp up the horribleness in the name of competition, the endgame seems rather bleak. we can't just demand that companies be better?

given Sonos' track record with the "lol, can't have anyone using an OLD PRODUCT THAT STILL WORKS FINE" thing i'm rather unsure we should really give them the benefit of the doubt here

ref https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086 for "recycle mode" fiasco

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I've been very critical of Sonos since before these incidents, but TBF, they've properly addressed both. I'm not sure WHY the client depends on the speaker's hardware capabilities, but I'd guess the old client source code was complex enough to warrant a rewrite and it wasn't cost effective maintaining backwards compatibility.

I don't think there was malice involved. Sonos seems like a company that has a very tough time making money, and since they IPO'd two years ago they are "responsible" to shareholders now (their stock opened at 15 and as of Oct 2 it was 15 -- could be worse!). Bricking old products would give a profit boost if everyone said ok and bought new products, but they underestimated the backlash.

It's the same reason their client sucks -- it will cost a lot of money to make native apps that take advantage of the respective eco-systems. The client suffices for most people so why bother?

That said, I'll go back to being pissed if they release new hardware I want and get rid of the 30% discount.

> it wasn't cost effective maintaining backwards compatibility

Open-source the last compatible version of the client and let the community maintain it? Or at the very least publish the API specification and let the community build a new one from scratch?

It's a shame this is being downvoted. People paid money for these devices, and it's disgusting that we allow companies to render inoperative perfectly working hardware just because they don't feel like supporting it anymore.

Open sourcing the old version of the software might be too much to ask for various reasons, but publishing API documentation in order to enable third party implementations IMO should be legally required in cases like this.

iirc it wouldn’t have been inoperative - it just couldn’t work with the newer software and therefore couldn’t be meshed with newer devices. I was under the impression that the hardware would work with the now legacy software without issue.

Yes please to the API bit. I'm maintaining the "unofficial Sonos controller for Linux" and it'd help a great deal if I didn't have to Wireshark the protocol all the time.

https://github.com/pascalopitz/unoffical-sonos-controller-fo...

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