7 ms·

> It used to be that when you bought an appliance, you owned it, and you could take it apart, repair it, and plug in whatever accessories you wanted without the

> It used to be that when you bought an appliance, you owned it, and you could take it apart, repair it, and plug in whatever accessories you wanted without the manufacturer's knowledge or permission. That's some glorious equivocation the EFF is pulling here. You can still do this today. Nothing stops you from taking apart, repairing and tweaking devices you buy. What you can't get today and that you could never, ever get before either, is the guarantee that the company you bought that device from will keep its servers alive for any given period of time. Anyone who thinks that open source is the way out of this dilemma needs a reality check. The fact that the source is open gives you exactly zero guarantees that a company will keep paying for servers that runs this code. Zero. If you're lucky, someone will pick that source up and deploy servers to run it, but again, no guarantees. > Customers likely didn't expect that, 18 months after the last Revolv Hubs were sold, instead of getting more upgrades, the device would be intentionally, permanently, and completely disabled. Then they were naïve customers. If the terms of service don't include such a guarantee, then you don't have it, period. It doesn't matter if the source is open or closed or if the company that provides the device is worth billions or just an angel funded startup. > In an ideal world, Hub owners would be free to point their devices at a different central server, run by a third-party competitor or a trusted friend, They can do this today, the world doesn't need to be "ideal", there just needs to be a financial incentive for a company to run such software. That's what happens in a free trade economy, supply and demand rule. This economy gives us a lot of benefits but you need to be ready to face the reality that sometimes, it won't give you what you want. > But there's another way to push back against untrustworthy devices, and that's refusing to buy electronics and software that prioritize the manufacturer's wishes above your own. What a great idea. Now, can you give a few examples of alternate devices that give us the kind of guarantee you are advocating? I would certainly love to hear about them. Sometimes, I wonder if the EFF lives on the same planet I live on.

cookiecaper 11y ago
>What you can't get today and that you could never, ever get before either, is the guarantee that the company you bought that device from will keep its servers alive for any given period of time. The thing that's different now is that in the old days, the days when it wasn't possible for devices to phone home, they operated independently and contained the functionality offered within themselves. There were no servers to worry about. It didn't matter if the manufacturer closed a business unit, discontinued the product, or anything else; the functionality you paid for at the time of purchase was contained within the component itself. These days, the functionality is contained in code running on someone else's servers, which may be shut down, disabled, or non-functional at any time. Potential solutions to this: a) educate consumers so that it's obvious when they're buying a device whose primary functions are not self-contained, and so that they don't buy these. b) make some legal requirement that the systems running the primary functionality are online and accessible for at least X time after the last unit is sold, or the code can be loaded onto and executed upon the device in a self-contained manner if the primary functional system goes offline, or similar. c) allow people to reverse engineer the hardware, make alternate firmwares that perform the promised functions within the device itself, require the primary functional service code be stored in escrow in case of shutdown, and, if shut down, then the copyright is automatically invalidated and the code automatically released, so that it can be run and/or modified by any interested party. Legal structures would have to be installed to protect people who do this.
idle_zealot 11y ago
I don't think anyone is arguing that open source will guarantee that some company will keep servers up. The reason people see open source as the answer to this problem is that it allows anyone to self host their own server.
ekianjo 11y ago
> Anyone who thinks that open source is the way out of this dilemma needs a reality check. What do you mean ? If it's Free software, then you should have no issue setting up a server at home by yourself. Many folks run their own server-side clients for online games, this is far from being unheard of.
slantyyz 11y ago
>> You can still do this today. Nothing stops you from taking apart, repairing and tweaking devices you buy. Well, the law can stop you from repairing your own John Deere tractor. https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/farmers-cant-legally-fix-their-own-john-deere-tractors-due-to-copyright-laws/ https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/farmers-cant-leg...
- kinsho 11y ago
  You're misrepresenting your case here. The law stops you from tinkering with the software of the tractor. You can tweak, repair, replace, or light on fire any part of the tractor you want, so long as you do not reverse-engineer the software inside the tractor. So technically, the law does not stop you from repairing any of the mechanical parts of your tractor. I'm not saying I agree with John Deere's attempt to prevent people from playing around with its tractor software, but I am saying that you're exaggerating here.
  - rahimnathwani 11y ago
    The software is an essential part of the tractor. The tractor isn't just the mechanical parts.
    - kinsho 11y ago
      Yes, but it's NOT the -only- part of the tractor. The commenter who brought up this tractor example made it seem like the government outlawed people from tinkering or repairing ANY part of the tractor. I also wouldn't be surprised if (much like cars), tractors generally only need mechanical repairs over the duration of their lifespans.
      - rahimnathwani 11y ago
        "The commenter who brought up this tractor example made it seem like the government outlawed people from tinkering or repairing ANY part of the tractor." No, they said "...the law can stop you from repairing...", which is true. "I also wouldn't be surprised if (much like cars), tractors generally only need mechanical repairs over the duration of their lifespans." I know little about tractors, but your statement is not true for modern cars. Often repairs cannot be completed by mechanical means alone, and require interfacing with or modifying the software in the car. Even if you replace a broken airbag, the light will stay on until you take the car to the dealer to have it reset. Even if your statement were true, who gets to decide what repairs are required over the life of the car/tractor? If not the owner, then why not?
kinsho 11y ago
Thank you for the dose of common sense here. The way that a free market works is that consumers effectively vote for certain products with their dollars. If consumers want a certain type of device, they will buy devices of that type and show suppliers that these devices are in demand, thus incentivizing them to produce even more of those devices. You may not like it, but sometimes, the market moves in ways you do not like. All you can do is adapt or put your own product out there instead.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Anyone who ever read about optimization, greedy algorithms or spent at least five minutes thinking about markets will be able to point out the problem - local minima. What consumers want is determined by what is available (and marketed), you have a feedback loop that ends up doing a lot of stupid shit. That's why, because we're smarter than bacteria, we augment markets with things like regulations, to kick them out of local minima. In this case, the free market is doing stupid shit again.
  - kinsho 11y ago
    This is an asinine argument. We live in a globalized world. You could perhaps make this argument if you were living in a closed society like North Korea. Besides that, you're missing something important about the idea of a free market. Whenever a problem or an issue arises, eventually somebody somewhere will introduce a product or solution that addresses that problem. If the problem is seen as troubling for a significant number of people, enough people will buy that solution/product, which will incentivize more suppliers/producers provide even more of such solutions and products. Basic economics. No need to write regulation to force companies to build functionality that people do not even want or care much about in the first place. If people are too stupid to look out for themselves, let them be punished for the consequences of their stupidity.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      No, what I say is even more evident in the globalized world than in a local market. Consider few things that break your vision of free market: - Economies of scale. In areas where fixed costs of production are huge, a one-size-barely-fits-all beats specialized solutions. Consider the mobile market. After Blackberry lost in the smartphone wars, there is no phone available that would be a decent tool. All of them are made for the lowest common denominator, and are useful for anything other than consumption as little as it is possible to still get people looking for practical aspects to buy them. Smartphone manufacturing has huge fixed costs, so when anyone ever tries to service a niche market, those phones are terribly expensive. - Related: customers don't demand new things, they chose from what is available. Most people do their tasks by choosing from what is available. Rarely one does dream up a new solution (those who do end up sometimes creating them). New solutions only appear when there's a market incentive to make them - when someone believes they can make money on it. Which is determined by what can be sold profitably, not by what people actually need. Compare: the famous (and probably misattributed) Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Also compare: Tesla having to force the market to accept electric vehicles by pouring shit tons of money until they actually became profitable. Rarely one has both enough will to fix the world and enough money to force the market to follow. - Related: market optimizes for profitability, not for value. "How much people are willing to pay for it" is only a proxy for "how this thing is useful". It's worth to look at the areas where this proxy fails. - Pour enough money into sales & marketing, and you can sell anything regardless of whether it is actually useful or not. People can be manipulated into believing they need your product, or the need may be manufactured out of thin air - and nowadays it's usually cheaper than making something actually useful. - Related: information asymmetry. The wonders of free market depend in a big part on perfect and instant information exchange. This is not the case in real world, and the companies have all the incentive to deceive and misinform customers about their products (and their competition).
imtringued 11y ago
> Zero. If you're lucky, someone will pick that source up and deploy servers to run it, but again, no guarantees. I know this sounds crazy but maybe the owner of the device could host the server themselves on a Raspberry Pi. By the way if everything was opensource then vendors would try to make their hubs compatible with as much devices of other vendors as possible. Now you don't have to replace everything in your home only the hub.

cookiecaper 11y ago

>What you can't get today and that you could never, ever get before either, is the guarantee that the company you bought that device from will keep its servers alive for any given period of time. The thing that's different now is that in the old days, the days when it wasn't possible for devices to phone home, they operated independently and contained the functionality offered within themselves. There were no servers to worry about. It didn't matter if the manufacturer closed a business unit, discontinued the product, or anything else; the functionality you paid for at the time of purchase was contained within the component itself. These days, the functionality is contained in code running on someone else's servers, which may be shut down, disabled, or non-functional at any time. Potential solutions to this: a) educate consumers so that it's obvious when they're buying a device whose primary functions are not self-contained, and so that they don't buy these. b) make some legal requirement that the systems running the primary functionality are online and accessible for at least X time after the last unit is sold, or the code can be loaded onto and executed upon the device in a self-contained manner if the primary functional system goes offline, or similar. c) allow people to reverse engineer the hardware, make alternate firmwares that perform the promised functions within the device itself, require the primary functional service code be stored in escrow in case of shutdown, and, if shut down, then the copyright is automatically invalidated and the code automatically released, so that it can be run and/or modified by any interested party. Legal structures would have to be installed to protect people who do this.

idle_zealot 11y ago

I don't think anyone is arguing that open source will guarantee that some company will keep servers up. The reason people see open source as the answer to this problem is that it allows anyone to self host their own server.

ekianjo 11y ago

> Anyone who thinks that open source is the way out of this dilemma needs a reality check. What do you mean ? If it's Free software, then you should have no issue setting up a server at home by yourself. Many folks run their own server-side clients for online games, this is far from being unheard of.

slantyyz 11y ago

>> You can still do this today. Nothing stops you from taking apart, repairing and tweaking devices you buy. Well, the law can stop you from repairing your own John Deere tractor. https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/farmers-cant-legally-fix-their-own-john-deere-tractors-due-to-copyright-laws/ https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/farmers-cant-leg...

kinsho 11y ago
You're misrepresenting your case here. The law stops you from tinkering with the software of the tractor. You can tweak, repair, replace, or light on fire any part of the tractor you want, so long as you do not reverse-engineer the software inside the tractor. So technically, the law does not stop you from repairing any of the mechanical parts of your tractor. I'm not saying I agree with John Deere's attempt to prevent people from playing around with its tractor software, but I am saying that you're exaggerating here.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  The software is an essential part of the tractor. The tractor isn't just the mechanical parts.
  - kinsho 11y ago
    Yes, but it's NOT the -only- part of the tractor. The commenter who brought up this tractor example made it seem like the government outlawed people from tinkering or repairing ANY part of the tractor. I also wouldn't be surprised if (much like cars), tractors generally only need mechanical repairs over the duration of their lifespans.
    - rahimnathwani 11y ago
      "The commenter who brought up this tractor example made it seem like the government outlawed people from tinkering or repairing ANY part of the tractor." No, they said "...the law can stop you from repairing...", which is true. "I also wouldn't be surprised if (much like cars), tractors generally only need mechanical repairs over the duration of their lifespans." I know little about tractors, but your statement is not true for modern cars. Often repairs cannot be completed by mechanical means alone, and require interfacing with or modifying the software in the car. Even if you replace a broken airbag, the light will stay on until you take the car to the dealer to have it reset. Even if your statement were true, who gets to decide what repairs are required over the life of the car/tractor? If not the owner, then why not?

kinsho 11y ago

Thank you for the dose of common sense here. The way that a free market works is that consumers effectively vote for certain products with their dollars. If consumers want a certain type of device, they will buy devices of that type and show suppliers that these devices are in demand, thus incentivizing them to produce even more of those devices. You may not like it, but sometimes, the market moves in ways you do not like. All you can do is adapt or put your own product out there instead.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Anyone who ever read about optimization, greedy algorithms or spent at least five minutes thinking about markets will be able to point out the problem - local minima. What consumers want is determined by what is available (and marketed), you have a feedback loop that ends up doing a lot of stupid shit. That's why, because we're smarter than bacteria, we augment markets with things like regulations, to kick them out of local minima. In this case, the free market is doing stupid shit again.
- kinsho 11y ago
  This is an asinine argument. We live in a globalized world. You could perhaps make this argument if you were living in a closed society like North Korea. Besides that, you're missing something important about the idea of a free market. Whenever a problem or an issue arises, eventually somebody somewhere will introduce a product or solution that addresses that problem. If the problem is seen as troubling for a significant number of people, enough people will buy that solution/product, which will incentivize more suppliers/producers provide even more of such solutions and products. Basic economics. No need to write regulation to force companies to build functionality that people do not even want or care much about in the first place. If people are too stupid to look out for themselves, let them be punished for the consequences of their stupidity.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    No, what I say is even more evident in the globalized world than in a local market. Consider few things that break your vision of free market: - Economies of scale. In areas where fixed costs of production are huge, a one-size-barely-fits-all beats specialized solutions. Consider the mobile market. After Blackberry lost in the smartphone wars, there is no phone available that would be a decent tool. All of them are made for the lowest common denominator, and are useful for anything other than consumption as little as it is possible to still get people looking for practical aspects to buy them. Smartphone manufacturing has huge fixed costs, so when anyone ever tries to service a niche market, those phones are terribly expensive. - Related: customers don't demand new things, they chose from what is available. Most people do their tasks by choosing from what is available. Rarely one does dream up a new solution (those who do end up sometimes creating them). New solutions only appear when there's a market incentive to make them - when someone believes they can make money on it. Which is determined by what can be sold profitably, not by what people actually need. Compare: the famous (and probably misattributed) Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Also compare: Tesla having to force the market to accept electric vehicles by pouring shit tons of money until they actually became profitable. Rarely one has both enough will to fix the world and enough money to force the market to follow. - Related: market optimizes for profitability, not for value. "How much people are willing to pay for it" is only a proxy for "how this thing is useful". It's worth to look at the areas where this proxy fails. - Pour enough money into sales & marketing, and you can sell anything regardless of whether it is actually useful or not. People can be manipulated into believing they need your product, or the need may be manufactured out of thin air - and nowadays it's usually cheaper than making something actually useful. - Related: information asymmetry. The wonders of free market depend in a big part on perfect and instant information exchange. This is not the case in real world, and the companies have all the incentive to deceive and misinform customers about their products (and their competition).

imtringued 11y ago

> Zero. If you're lucky, someone will pick that source up and deploy servers to run it, but again, no guarantees. I know this sounds crazy but maybe the owner of the device could host the server themselves on a Raspberry Pi. By the way if everything was opensource then vendors would try to make their hubs compatible with as much devices of other vendors as possible. Now you don't have to replace everything in your home only the hub.