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Comment by markmark | Hacker News Reader

This is local only over a pretty simple communication protocol. Hammerhead had previously licensed that protocol, but Shimano cancelled the contract when Hammerhead were acquired by Shimano's largest competitor.

I'm not a lawyer so don't know if they _need_ to have a license for the protocol, but presumably they think they do.

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> I'm not a lawyer so don't know if they _need_ to have a license for the protocol, but presumably they think they do.

They don't but they were probably using a licensed library they no longer have access to and would need to develop their own library first.

I wouldn't be surprised if they signed something explicit about not using the protocol without authorisation or something.

I have implemented the binary protocol from scratch many years ago. Amusingly, at the time, the data files downloaded from Garmins was pretty much the same protocol but just in a file. If you got a USB Ant+ receiver you got, as I recall, the same protocol from libusb.

I guess the problem is, once they have been given the protocol in a document covered by an NDA they can't use it outside that contract, even though they could trivially clean-room it.

They could easily outsource development to a company that is not under NDA right?

I wonder if Shimano really cancelled of if there was some clause in the original agreement for preventing automatic handover in case of an acquisition that was invoked by some legal division at Shimano that simply doesn't have strategic decisions or customer happiness anywhere close of their job descriptions. Are they really actively trying to hurt a competitor or is it just some organizational automatism with nobody sufficiently in charge top correct course? I'm not exactly prone to defend Shimano (jumping through hoops to run Campagnolo), but I wouldn't be surprised if it all ended up with a big, genuine "sorry, we don't quite understand why exactly it happened"

Some (all?) parts of Shimano's Di2 system communicates via a proprietary protocol. The industry has standardized on ANT+, Shimano uses their own protocol. Hammerhead had a license agreement to use it. Shimano revoked (or opted to not renew) that license.

Every type of device that communicates over ANT has a profile. Shimano does not use the public shifting profile, but a closed (basically beta) profile.

Usually profiles start closed but eventually an open profile is published and devices move to it. Shimano failed to do so here.

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