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"The stifling innovation argument is faulty anyway. If you are really innovating, then there should be no reason to fear releasing the code for something the co

"The stifling innovation argument is faulty anyway. If you are really innovating, then there should be no reason to fear releasing the code for something the company considers obsolete." Many products contain proprietary elements that are licensed by third-parties who have no reason to agree to their software being open-sourced. The company I work at constantly gets calls to open-source product X that they discontinued, but they can't because of the reliance on code that doesn't belong to them. And predictably enough, they're not willing to go back and renegotiate a new license for a product that they're discontinuing.

WalterBright 7y ago
Many companies don't want to open source their code because then they have to accept liability for the provenance of the code. It's not that they are aware of improprieties in the provenance, it's just that they don't have proof there are none. And since open sourcing it does not result in revenue, they cannot justify the cost of vetting the provenance. A way to fix this would be to shorten patent and copyright terms.
ryandrake 7y ago
This has always been a total BS excuse and we should not let companies handwave it away this way. Ok, so 5% of your firmware is licensed from some other company (who somehow never is named in these discussions) and is therefore somehow impossible to open source. Fine. So open source the remaining 95%!
cafxx 7y ago
Fair enough, but hardly a problem. Open source the non third-party code, and give instructions about how to link to the third-party blobs that you have already distributed as part of the original firmware. Will it build as-is? Probably not. Will it build if someone really wants it, and is willing to spend some time to get it to work? Likely. Will it have the exact same functionalities as the original firmware? Possibly not. Does it give users a way out of planned obsolescence? Yes.

WalterBright 7y ago

Many companies don't want to open source their code because then they have to accept liability for the provenance of the code. It's not that they are aware of improprieties in the provenance, it's just that they don't have proof there are none. And since open sourcing it does not result in revenue, they cannot justify the cost of vetting the provenance. A way to fix this would be to shorten patent and copyright terms.

ryandrake 7y ago

This has always been a total BS excuse and we should not let companies handwave it away this way. Ok, so 5% of your firmware is licensed from some other company (who somehow never is named in these discussions) and is therefore somehow impossible to open source. Fine. So open source the remaining 95%!

cafxx 7y ago

Fair enough, but hardly a problem. Open source the non third-party code, and give instructions about how to link to the third-party blobs that you have already distributed as part of the original firmware. Will it build as-is? Probably not. Will it build if someone really wants it, and is willing to spend some time to get it to work? Likely. Will it have the exact same functionalities as the original firmware? Possibly not. Does it give users a way out of planned obsolescence? Yes.