Yeah that's quite fair, the article is not very accurate.

It sounds like there are two main pieces to me:

1. Removal of cloud dependency

2. Making usable the API (and providing documentation)

With a minor 3rd piece:

3. The official app will be updated to support the "offline" mode without losing as many features as possible now that the cloud service is going away.

All very laudable things IMHO. I'm actually going to buy one of these

Source code to what?

This is making them controllable.

The headline may be inaccurate, but I'm not clear on what source code you'd even want. To the firmware do you mean?

A documented API seems like the most useful option here.

Maybe Bose doesn’t have all the rights necessary to open source their code, eg because they rely on libraries.

Firstly, the source code is probably being used on newer devices, so Bose would not like sharing their proprietary solutions which might contain thirds party code they cannot share.

Secondly, these devices are basically one step above embedded. It's highly unlikely you can load and run anything custom on them.

Since they are opening up the API, you can keep using them for what they were made for, which is at least a solid basic liberty

I admit that I expected more. They really did the minimum, as in, anything less should have been illegal. It is praiseworthy, but it is unfortunate that it is.

Seeing that, I expected the ability to build and run a custom firmware, like with an Android device with its bootloader unlocked. But it is not that, and they didn't open source their app either.

What they did is that they removed dependence on their servers, and opened their device to be controlled by third party apps. That is, they let users use their device past its end of life, including when the first party app will stop being maintained, but not to the point of letting user add features.

In understand why they would do that, they don't want users to backport features only available on their latest models that are sold at a premium, therefore competing against themselves. After all, the value in smart speakers is not the sound producing device, which I think is a problem that has been solved more than a decade ago at the consumer level, it is all about software features.

Agree that the 'Open Source' is misapplied in this instance. I do applaud Bose for providing a graceful EoL to their product and consumers.

Yeah, it's kinda sad how much applause this is garnering when publishing API specs should be bare minimum for any smart device, never mind EoL concerns.