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Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

There are three possibilities:

  1. Google wants to monetize the novel features of Glass
  2. Google is bound by licenses for the technology, and is unable to open source certain bits
  3. They will open source everything eventually, but decided to rush this bit for publicity reasons

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There are lots more possibilities, but the one that I think makes the most chance is:

  4. Google is required to release the kernel code under the GPL

No such requirement exists for the other code.

The big pay-off for google is that to use glass you need to use google. If the devices were 'open' then you would not need google to use glass and they'd be in a cue-cat situation.

cue-cat didn't retail for $1500

The absolute price is not important. What is important is whether or not it is subsidized at the current price.

I sadly agree with this. I love Google and their open web attitude, however you cannot look at Apple's success over the past 5 years and not go green with envy. I fear that Google is going to want to try to copy Apple's business model. Of course it's the obvious thing to do but it's sad from a consumer's standpoint.

Or they're trying to not help the amazon's of the world that just fork their product and remove the monetizing bits of it, and replace it with their own monetizing bits.

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