In short, the people who "purchased" these cameras do not own them.
Specifically, the owners of these cameras may own the hardware, but cannot use it because they do not own nor control the software that runs it.
Richard Stallman predicted this decades ago. Regardless of what you think of him, he was the first person to come up with the idea of free open-source software expressly to give users the ability to (quoting) "control the program and what it does for them. When users don't control the program, we call it a 'nonfree' or 'proprietary' program. The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program."[a]
Not that I disagree but in this case it seems to be mostly about "free" cloud storage ending:
> Starting April 1, the company would no longer support models that included no-fee seven-day rolling storage of video clips—a well-advertised selling point.
And cameras were still being able to be used with external storage
> Instead, Arlo device owners could upgrade to one of the company’s paid plans, starting at $13 a month or buy an add-on device to store videos.
Which is... exactly what you'd have to do with fully open source system anyway, buy a box to store it or pay someone for storage.
I mean if you thought you will pay flat fee and get online hosting till the end of time (and most likely didn't read the fine print that said it isn't infinite in time), that's on you
Eh, I disagree here. Like some responsibility is always on the consumer, but clear information is essential in good markets.
If I pay for a hard drive and get one TB of space, I get it til the end of time. If some other product says "1 TB of storage", with no other context, it'd be easy to confuse the two (especially for people who aren't tech-savvy).
> If I pay for a hard drive and get one TB of space, I get it til the end of time. If some other product says "1 TB of storage", with no other context, it'd be easy to confuse the two (especially for people who aren't tech-savvy).
If your physical object you bought that stores the data physically on the object , sure. But it was not that, it was cloud service
But people bought physical cameras. It's not unreasonable to think "I am buying this camera with one week of storage". If you don't know how technology works and it's not clearly explained, it's very easy to misconstrue that.
> Which is... exactly what you'd have to do with fully open source system anyway, buy a box to store it or pay someone for storage.
Wrong. I'd simply host the video on some device I have sitting around. Storing streamed video isn't hard to do and there are many ways to do it that take little effort. Being forced to pay money for something I already have capability to do is the problem. It's wasteful and makes me happy I did not buy Arlo's product.
Right but the selling point was never "... and you can just use your NAS to store it!". We can complain about their shitty e-waste producing model but also acknowledge it is not product targeted to nerds building their own video monitoring infrastructure, OSS or not.
> Right but the selling point was never "... and you can just use your NAS to store it!".
This is actually the problem with these products, there's absolutely no fallback. I wonder how many people buy another Arlo when they get bit by the artificial end of life?
Hardware is completely proprietary and closed source. All camera communications go through a black box hub device which talks to Arlo’s services. There’s no public API for any part of the hardware or software chain.
In other words, unless you’re going to take the time to reverse engineer all of it, you’re completely at their mercy.
Even if you opt for local storage you’re still beholden to their black box hub because that’s the only thing the cameras will talk to, and their app because that’s the only thing that will talk to their hub. (HomeKit and other integration exists but it doesn’t provide the full functionality you get from the app, and still requires their hub.)
> They do own the camera. They just don't own the cloud service that makes the camera useful. Or even operable.
I don’t know the model, but the article makes it seem as if the cameras work perfectly well without it? I hate online-only products and think they are between scam and trap, but this seems more a case of false advertising than anything like that.
Well-ish depending on your use case. It still requires their app, hub, and cloud services to work even just for steaming. There’s no completely “local only” mode.
You can use local storage to save recordings by connecting flash storage to the hub, but it’s only really useful a backup. You can’t view it in the app (you have to sneaker-net the storage to a computer), and it can only save triggered recordings.
Basically if you don’t care about storing and saving recordings for future use and only plan to stream from the cameras, then it’ll continue to work (as long as Arlo’s web services work of course).
Specifically, the owners of these cameras may own the hardware, but cannot use it because they do not own nor control the software that runs it.
Richard Stallman predicted this decades ago. Regardless of what you think of him, he was the first person to come up with the idea of free open-source software expressly to give users the ability to (quoting) "control the program and what it does for them. When users don't control the program, we call it a 'nonfree' or 'proprietary' program. The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program."[a]
He was, and is, right about this.
[a] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html