How an emotional support robot for children was saved from death thanks to open source
The Moxie robot © Embodied
This is a case that seriously questions the growing dependence on the Internet of our everyday objects. At the beginning of December, the startup Embodied delivers terrible news to its customers : due to an aborted financing round, the company will close its doors and at the same time unplug the servers that give life to its star product: Moxie, an $800 robot supposed to help the emotional development of children aged 5 at 10 years old.
The affair caused a stir among Embodied's customers and supporters of open source and the right to repair. The gadget itself being practically nothing more than an empty shell equipped with a Wi-Fi chip to receive instructions from the cloud, the extinction of the servers means the assured death of the little robot released a few years later. early. A chemically pure illustration of planned obsolescence and the problems linked to our connected objects.
To make matters worse, Embodied indicates on its home page that it cannot do “no promises“as for a possible refund, not being able to ensure the maintenance of its product and indicates in black and white that”Moxie relies on the cloud to provide its functionality and these cannot be replicated locally“. This was without counting on the perseverance of a few code enthusiasts.
Self-hosted empathy
As noted the media Fight to Repairafter the announcement of the company's closure, former engineers from Embodied immediately began developing an open source program allowing the functionalities of the Moxie cloud to be replicated locally.
“The idea is to develop a local application (“OpenMoxie”) that you can run on your own computer“, then indicates the CEO of Embodied. “This community solution will allow you or someone with technical skills to maintain the basic functionalities of Moxie, develop new ones or modify its operation to better meet your needs.“
If, for the moment, OpenMoxie is not yet officially available, the little robot has already received an update in order to prepare for the software transition. Update that all consumers are encouraged to download as quickly as possible, as it too will disappear once the servers are disconnected.
All that remains is for parents who have not yet announced the sad news to their children to learn the basics of self-hosting in order to hope one day not to see the pixels go out one by one in the little one's eyes. robot.
Sadly exemplary behavior
If the case perfectly illustrates the problems linked to our dependence on the cloud, in particular because it directly touches our heartstrings, Embodied's behavior in this situation is sadly exemplary. Other companies with much better financial and human resources do not always make the effort to turn to open source or the benefits of self-hosting.
Spotify, for example, ended its Car Thing project last Decemberrendering thousands of streaming devices unusable and heading for the dumpster. All without offering any alternative to keep the device alive. And if other stories resemble that of Moxie, like with the Rebble collective which gave a second life to Pebble watches, they are very (too?) rare.
Cloud version software obsolescence
These beautiful stories should not be the tree that hides the forest either. If many companies allow themselves to send perfectly functional silicon to the trash, it is because the legislative framework around these devices is minimal, if not non-existent. Supporters of the right to repair and other advocates of sustainability have long called for guarantees on the update times of connected devices, or even an obligation to publish the source code once support has ended.
In France, the sustainability index is a first step towards regulating these practices. The law on planned obsolescence also condemns “any technique, including software, by which a marketer aims to make the repair or reconditioning of a device impossible“. But here, the intentionality of the approach is always complicated to qualify, especially in the case of a device dependent on the cloud which, by definition, is dependent on an outsourced resource to ensure its operation.
What the Moxie affair illustrates well is the danger for the planet of connected devices without guarantee and without long-term vision. In short, software obsolescence in cloud version.
