Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth
There's a virtuous cycle thing going on here: Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs (Xiaomi has a good track record here), people are overjoyed because you can't easily get good hardware for cheap and build a bunch of software around it, thus (usually greatly) extending the capabilities of the product, other people buy that product because it's much more advanced than competitors (because of all the extra software), profit for the parent company.Basically, the company gets a bunch of people to do work for free, the product gets improved, the company makes profit, everybody wins.