Oculus will allow sideloading and rooting to avoid e-waste

Duplicate: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28647316" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28647316</a><p>But also, seriously, they already allow sideloading on <i>literally every device they&#x27;ve ever put out.</i> They don&#x27;t stop you from using adb. Rooting is cool and new to the platform, and so are alternate operating systems! But sideloading onto them isn&#x27;t new.

This has parallels with how iD always open sourced their previous generation game engines.<p>John Carmack was behind that too (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;iYk4Y5a6qmI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;iYk4Y5a6qmI</a> interview about it).<p>It’s really good to see an engineer and leader who thinks of the greater good and what follows.

Good news; but it’s hard to trust Facebook at this point.<p>- They already demonstrated user hostile approach with the mandatory FB accounts.<p>- People might use sideloading&#x2F;rooting to reduce tracking and ads; long term I believe FB will want to fight that.

This is for the Go. It&#x27;s a great initiative to unlock the device at EOL. I would prefer it to be unlocked by law at purchase, but understand that often the cost has been heavily subsidized by the lock-in and mandating an unlock by law would result in higher prices. For instance, there is a business version of the Quest that is not tied to a FB account, but is twice the price.

&quot;I hope this is a precedent for when headsets go unsupported in the future, but damn, getting all the necessary permissions for this involved SO much more effort that you would expect.&quot;

How do we get this made into law, this unlocking of EOL hardware...

My 5 year old really wants a VR set. Oculus is not an option. Are there other VR headsets that are either standalone or PC driven that would be good for that age group?

Does anyone even use the Go? I&#x27;m a full time VR developer and I haven&#x27;t heard of the Go in over a year. Still great to see this kind of move coming from Facebook though.<p>Here&#x27;s hoping for the same initiative for the Quest 2

It&#x27;s not mentioned in the linked tweet, but does anyone here know whether they have plans to do something similar with the Rift&#x2F;CV1?

&gt;I hope this is a precedent for when headsets go unsupported in the future, but damn, getting all the necessary permissions for this involved SO much more effort that you would expect.<p>This is one of those things that if you <i>start</i> with it as a goal, it is relatively easy, but if you want to ADD it later, can be insanely difficult - or impossible.

Specifically for the Oculus Go.

Having root access to your VR device is cool, but having full, open source access to your VR device is even cooler :]<p>www.simulavr.com

This is an aside but not really since we’re discussing a representative of a disgraceful social media platform who’s posting on a different disgraceful social media platform: I can’t even look at a Twitter user’s profile now without being logged in to an account? What a disgrace.

hmm the top reply is &#x27;what about the quest&#x27; and JC is like<p>&gt; I hope this is a precedent for when headsets go unsupported in the future, but damn, getting all the necessary permissions for this involved SO much more effort that you would expect.<p>&#x27;old hardware supports OSS, new hardware doesn&#x27;t&#x27; feels like a medium win for the repair movement but still not the world I want to live in<p>we should pass laws so hardware vendors can&#x27;t be the sole OS vendor on their platform

nice!

To further avoid e-waste, I will avoid Oculus (or anything else Facebook).