[sangnoir]

> Because of course they will. I mean, it might cost them $10 annually to keep it up?

For large tech companies, it's most likely due to organizational reasons. Someone (likely some team) has to own any component/subsystem and be responsible for its maintenance. This obviously comes at a cost of the teams' other projects (read bonus OKRs), a direct consequence is that it becomes hard to permanently rehome a dead-end project like the Stadia controller, best you can hope is a temporary reprieve from a sympathetic team.

[mdaniel]

OT1H, I hear you and that was my suspicion too: they tossed the site into some nginx pod on some k8s cluster and those things don't live forever

But, for a discontinued product, isn't the information static and thus the GCS "turn this bucket into a webserver and don't bother me anymore" ( https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/static-website#example... ) seems like even less than the cited $10/yr. If the next question is "to which Project does the GCS bucket get billed?" then I'm pretty sure GCP gives away tiny storage to anyone with an email

[pram]

Are Google teams even allowed to use GCS?

[derefr]

I wonder why companies don’t just donate dead projects “to the community” more often: find a volunteer maintainer willing to take the project on; get them set up with ownership rights over a clone of the project on a non-corp-internal SCM; ensure all branding and IP is stripped from the project; and then just walk away. Link to this “third party” effort when anyone asks for support, mentioning that it is unsupported.

[fragmede]

Licensing. Especially when hardware is concerned. Google, big as they are, don't own the rights to NXP or especially Broadcom's IP, and so they can't.

[IntelMiner]

Google (in theory) isn't making any more of these controllers, nor updating the firmware anymore

Surely there's no clause that says they have to perpetually license old firmware binaries?

[kalleboo]

If they want to perpetually distribute old firmware binaries they have to perpetually license them

[jacquesm]

Because they are risk averse and there is no possible upside so they eliminate it completely to avoid any possible downside.

[awill]

if the update was just an executable, it wouldn't require maintenance, just hosting. They chose to have the update use a webservice. That's on them. I'm not mad about it. I use Linux, so I was able to update my controller on Chrome/Linux. I expected to need to borrow a Windows computer.

[solarkraft]

It costs money and doesn't gain you any (when you don't consider the probably significant good will).

[vineyardmike]

1. Google probably uses IP owned by the chip manufacturer (nxp).

2. Google, famously, uses a “monorepo”. One of the perks of this is that it allows a significant amount of code-reuse. They may not want to commit to sharing all the internal libraries they’ve built.