News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018. Parent comment

Re:Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018 by pavel_lishin on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @09:42AM (#15652820)
It does sound easy to solve, unless you start digging into the inevitable workarounds and exceptions to the law.

What if service isn't discontinued, but merely suspended?

What if the company goes out of business? What if it's purchased, and becomes a different legal entity?

What if the service is discontinued as the result of a legal action?

What if the API depends on some proprietary technology?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018 by pc86 on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @09:51AM (#15652931)
What if one license on one dependency prohibits it from being open sourced?

"Just open source it!" is a knee-jerk reaction with little bearing on the practical realities.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018 by pavel_lishin on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @10:34AM (#15653418)
There's no way to make this sound non-insulting to the person I originally responded to, but one of my most-hated pet peeves is the "it's easy, just <8 year old's solution to a problem>" comment.

"Why don't we just make bad things illegal?"

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018 by lurker12390879 on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @11:25AM (#15653926)
"Source available" - ie licensed for end users to build and use, vs "open source" would be a good middle ground for such cases.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018 by pavel_lishin on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @11:51AM (#15654182)
Ok; what if a dependency forbids that?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018 by lurker12390879 on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @03:42PM (#15698914)
Write an open source alternative or put the deps under the same license.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018 by dpark on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @11:13AM (#15653823)
What if the API is open sourced and it doesn’t matter because the device is not open sourced and provides no way to point it to an equivalent API service?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018 by pavel_lishin on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @11:19AM (#15653879)
I think that's slightly simpler to work around - my mom probably wouldn't be able to do it without help, but most people commenting here could redirect DNS requests to point to your own API.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018 by dpark on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @11:32AM (#15653998)
Sure. But assuming Logitech isn’t completely incompetent, that connection will be TLS and the device will refuse to handshake when it receives some random cert that doesn’t match the domain it expects (or is signed by a CA it doesn’t trust).
[ Parent | on HN ]