[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.