"Open source" really isn't the right term here, if they're just releasing API specifications. "Open sourcing" the speakers would be releasing the source code to the software that runs on the speakers.
Like, all of Microsoft's libraries on Windows have a publicly-documented interface. That hardly makes them open source. Just means that people can write software that make use of them.
It would be one thing for a corporation to misuse the term open source as they've been doing lately. It's pretty bad for one of the biggest and oldest tech news sites to be doing it.
We need a law that companies provide device owners root access for every end of life device.
Basic documentation does not equal open source.
Toaster ovens from 40 years ago did better. They came with a technical diagram.
That's a pretty cool thing to do
PDF reference of the API here: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025.12.18-SoundTouch-Web-API.pdf
Is there any quality, real open-source speakers? Or it's way better not bother with it and get dumb speakers and an SBC?
Chad Bose.
They're never getting those integrations back though, e.g. Spotify. Those are usually implemented in each company's servers rather than something that can be brokered locally through an API. That needs to change
That’s fantastic. Can Apple Pay attention to this?
No.
open-sources
To repeat my comment over on !technology@lemmy.world, "open-sources" isn't really the right term here, as the source code that runs the speakers isn't being released. This is just releasing API documentation to let software interact with the speakers.
This is great to see, and as long as it's up to companies whether to do this we need to encourage that behavior... but it also shouldn't be up to companies' whims whether to do this or not. It should be legally required for end-of-support devices and software to release whatever source code or changes are necessary to either operate the device/software independent of a server, or run the server ourselves.
I always recall Bose for their high quality almost 'vintage' devices, and they should encourage their newer digital devices to become the old high quality devices that still work, sitting in someone's home.
Distributing the documentation of your API is not making your device open source, what the fuck kind of tech journalism is that
PDF is open-source, LLM black box is open-source, everything is open-source. Those companies must really want to destroy the meaning of open-source.
They didn't open-source it. They released an API spec. The author seems not to understand what "open source" means. What they did was a step in the right direction though.
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