Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there's licensing issues with them doing so? Like I assume they didn't make all the hardware and firmware involved.

Kind of a shame when companies do this.

I also wonder how long till the hacker community starts hacking these things any way? Seems like a worthy device to hack, though I can't imagine there's millions of these out there. I'd love to buy a 2nd hand one and install custom software on it if someone builds said firmware.

Hell, if Spotify had open sourced this and still sold them, I might have bought a first hand one. I would just be streaming my Apple music to it instead. ;)

View on HN

Spotify almost certainly developed Car Thing using license encumbered software, and this illustrates how encumbered licenses are anti-freedom and are causes of unnecessary e-waste.

Thankfully folks have started organizing to reverse engineer the device:

- https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineer...

- https://hackaday.com/2024/05/30/old-spotify-car-thing-hacks-...

Even if there isn’t third party licensed software in this Thing, it still can take significant work to open-source an internal project that wasn’t intended to be public from the start.

And given the price of tech labor, most businesses are going to want to put their engineers on active projects.

The count down to an HN post of Car Thing runs Doom has now started

Someone already did that https://x.com/justmaku/status/1584442208203087872

...and of course they did! I didn't actually expect it to be playable with the knob control like that, so I'm actually even more impressed. I was just expecting it to compile and run, but not necessarily play.

There must be a rule of that. If you think someone will probably make it run DOOM someday, someone already has.

> Seems like a worthy device to hack

I haven't opened mine up yet but there's not a lot there that an ESP32, a screen, and an encoder couldn't replace. I'll probably disassemble mine for the encoder knob and see if I can't repurpose the screen. The actual hardware isn't particularly compelling otherwise.

fairly certain they used this: https://w.dspconcepts.com/, they used to have Spotify listed a a client. I'm guessing they cannot open source for this reason (it's not their code to open source)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com