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Comment by rew0rk | Hacker News Reader

> Available until December 31, 2023

Meaning that controllers that have the old firmware will be unable to switch after that date? This seems like a weird restriction to have if this is a firmware update?

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I assume it requires something hosted, and can't be open sourced due to licensing restrictions*. Hopefully it can be reverse engineered.

*I've heard from firmware engineers inside and outside of Google that licensing is the biggest reason why stuff isn't open sourced.

I mean, that's absolutely true for Android hardware. If MediaTek or Qualcomm or any other supplier for the various parts open sourced their drivers we would be able to port any new version of AOSP to basically everything that has enough juice to run it and then some.

Unfortunately these companies control the drivers and have the strictest licenses imaginable, so even companies like Samsung or Google can only offer updates as long as their suppliers allow them, after that it's just waiting for the ABI to break and the old drivers to stop working

I am beyond grateful for Bluetooth functionality on a free controller, but the greedy part of me was half-hoping Google would unlock the device and open source the gamepad-over-ip code. My wish is selfish: I wasn't play Steam games that are on a gaming PC in a different room to my TV, the PC is well outside of bluetooth range, but both areas have WiFi coverage. I acknowledge that this is a first-world problem, but regardless, I hope someone will be able to reverse-engineer the firmware and come up with an open-version.

Presumably there's some server side component that Google wants to turn off

Maybe a code signing certificate (or some boot ticket signing backend) for the firmware will expire at that date?

It's all part of the gamepads-as-a-service business plan :P

Google must kill everything. EVERYTHING.

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