[m-ee]

Valve did something similar for the Vive tracker dev kit. There was a time before the standalone tracker was available https://www.vive.com/us/accessory/vive-tracker/

where if you wanted a tracker that wasn't a full controller you had to build it yourself. This involved a paid workshop in Seattle to get access to the dev kit and learn their tooling. Hardware was open source, but firmware was closed. If you wanted firmware changes you had to pay Synapse consulting fees for them to do it for you, and the updated firmware would then be made available free of charge to anyone else who paid for the workshop.

[PragmaticPulp]

The Valve situation sounds like they attempted to open source after the fact, which doesn’t work with large hardware projects.

The only way to really open source a hardware project of this magnitude is to set open source as a constraint from the start. If you don’t, you inevitably end up with someone licensing some code somewhere from a vendor that can’t be open sourced. It gets integrated deeply enough that the project can’t exist without that piece and it’s too late to rewrite around it so the open source commitment goes out the window.

If I had to guess, it sounds like Valve tried to work around the situation with the workshop where participants entered into some contract as part of the workshop.

And if I had to guess about the Facebook situation, it was probably decided to open source the project after the fact. I’m guessing they wrote the website copy while someone else went off to try to secure open source permission for all components involved and they never reconciled the two efforts, hence the weird dead eBay links and missing files.

[m-ee]

I shouldn't have called it open source, it was source available to customers who paid for the training course and signed a license agreement. Don't think they ever had intention of making it open. I found the model especially strange because of the requirement that any custom changes you asked for would be available to everyone else (your competitors). I guess they didn't actually want the workload of custom changes so this was a way of further disincentivizing it?

https://www.synapse.com/steamvr

[derefr]

> I found the model especially strange because of the requirement that any custom changes you asked for would be available to everyone else (your competitors).

It's the same model as any game-console SDK. If you ask for changes to the SDK, those changes are going into "the SDK", which all customers get access to. Platform providers don't tend to offer work-for-hire for custom forks of their code; instead, what they're offering is to prioritize adding certain features to the shared upstream codebase. In the end, the platform provider wants there to just be one SDK, that solves the superset of all their customers' problems. Anything else is a ridiculously-large maintenance burden.