4 ms·

Honest question: could right to repair legislation apply to software too? In a universe where it did, what would that look like?

pmontra 4y ago
Open source? From [1] "[with the GPL the FSF is] reshaping how programs are made in order to give everyone the right to understand, repair, improve, and redistribute the best-quality software on earth" [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Open source is an alternative to legislated proprietary software. There is no feasible path towards legislating that all software companies must provide the source code for their products today. Though that may have been an alternative future had our timeline forked somewhere in the early 1970s.
dotancohen 4y ago
Heavy NDAs so only large companies could "repair" the software. Thus making repair expensive beyond feasibility. Better legislation would require timely support for commercial software that is sold for a purpose, with a stated minimum timeframe not unlike a warranty.
kmeisthax 4y ago
No, because software carries copyright, and any law that touches that would be struck down by federal preemption and international treaties. While most of that preemption is specifically America's idea, the US is also chock full of people holding all sorts of base assumptions that copyright and patents are fundamentally good. This is the country full of people who get angry when China "steals our IP", rather than getting angry that companies were hoarding knowledge from everyone else for profit, or getting angry that China isn't sharing their pirate's booty. Yes, technically, only the agenda of the rich gets passed in the US; but that's mostly because the US has done such a great job of aligning the interests of an enfranchised middle class and rich people that people aren't willing to question copyright at a low enough level to make "software R2R" legislatively viable. We're the country of people who pirate movies and then blame pirates for tanking the sales of those movies. Anyway, if you want to know what a minimal software R2R bill would look like, it would probably be a copyright exception that allowed distributing unauthorized modifications to software under specific circumstances, probably with the added stipulation that the modifications need to be distributed in a form that cannot be used without a licensed copy of the original software. That sounds simple enough but you immediately bring on all sorts of related questions if you add such a large gaping hole to the copyright system. Do people who make these fixes get copyright protection, too? In the US, licensed derivative works get a separate copyright that the original author is at risk of infringing upon. Unlicensed derivatives are uncopyrightable; this is why it's legal to pirate fanart[0], because the alternative would be fanworks boxing out the original artist of their own work. If someone fixes software under software R2R, should the original software vendor be allowed to incorporate that fix back into their own work? Should other vendors be able to use that fix and modify it further? Those questions are very critical to answer, and I don't have good answers for them. FWIW software R2R would also thoroughly break the GPL copyleft, because it relies upon everything I just said about derivative works. The thing is, GPL is also the most friendly software to right-to-repair, specifically because it requires source code disclosure. A badly written software repair exception would not only destroy this, but also give us a repair ecosystem of people with binary-only software patches suing each other for stealing their own work and just recursing back into the same copyright maximalism problem we already have. [0] Strictly speaking, if you pirate, say, One Piece[1] fanart and sold it on a t-shirt, Shueisha can still sue you. The artist who made the fanart can't - not even if it was Shueisha themselves pirating pirate fanart on t-shirts and selling it. [1] STOP! 海賊版
Nextgrid 4y ago
Good documentation around how proprietary software behaves so it can be troubleshot (in the automotive field this already exists, they don't give you raw source code but they give you the exact sequence of operations under which a trouble code is set - for example, "this DTC is set if the battery voltage goes below 11V for 2 seconds" or oscilloscope waveforms of raw sensor signals) and a ban on bullshit restrictions in the name of "security" such as the binding of Touch ID buttons to the mainboard.

pmontra 4y ago

Open source? From [1] "[with the GPL the FSF is] reshaping how programs are made in order to give everyone the right to understand, repair, improve, and redistribute the best-quality software on earth" [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html

dotancohen 4y ago
Open source is an alternative to legislated proprietary software. There is no feasible path towards legislating that all software companies must provide the source code for their products today. Though that may have been an alternative future had our timeline forked somewhere in the early 1970s.

dotancohen 4y ago

Heavy NDAs so only large companies could "repair" the software. Thus making repair expensive beyond feasibility. Better legislation would require timely support for commercial software that is sold for a purpose, with a stated minimum timeframe not unlike a warranty.

kmeisthax 4y ago

No, because software carries copyright, and any law that touches that would be struck down by federal preemption and international treaties. While most of that preemption is specifically America's idea, the US is also chock full of people holding all sorts of base assumptions that copyright and patents are fundamentally good. This is the country full of people who get angry when China "steals our IP", rather than getting angry that companies were hoarding knowledge from everyone else for profit, or getting angry that China isn't sharing their pirate's booty. Yes, technically, only the agenda of the rich gets passed in the US; but that's mostly because the US has done such a great job of aligning the interests of an enfranchised middle class and rich people that people aren't willing to question copyright at a low enough level to make "software R2R" legislatively viable. We're the country of people who pirate movies and then blame pirates for tanking the sales of those movies. Anyway, if you want to know what a minimal software R2R bill would look like, it would probably be a copyright exception that allowed distributing unauthorized modifications to software under specific circumstances, probably with the added stipulation that the modifications need to be distributed in a form that cannot be used without a licensed copy of the original software. That sounds simple enough but you immediately bring on all sorts of related questions if you add such a large gaping hole to the copyright system. Do people who make these fixes get copyright protection, too? In the US, licensed derivative works get a separate copyright that the original author is at risk of infringing upon. Unlicensed derivatives are uncopyrightable; this is why it's legal to pirate fanart[0], because the alternative would be fanworks boxing out the original artist of their own work. If someone fixes software under software R2R, should the original software vendor be allowed to incorporate that fix back into their own work? Should other vendors be able to use that fix and modify it further? Those questions are very critical to answer, and I don't have good answers for them. FWIW software R2R would also thoroughly break the GPL copyleft, because it relies upon everything I just said about derivative works. The thing is, GPL is also the most friendly software to right-to-repair, specifically because it requires source code disclosure. A badly written software repair exception would not only destroy this, but also give us a repair ecosystem of people with binary-only software patches suing each other for stealing their own work and just recursing back into the same copyright maximalism problem we already have. [0] Strictly speaking, if you pirate, say, One Piece[1] fanart and sold it on a t-shirt, Shueisha can still sue you. The artist who made the fanart can't - not even if it was Shueisha themselves pirating pirate fanart on t-shirts and selling it. [1] STOP! 海賊版

Nextgrid 4y ago

Good documentation around how proprietary software behaves so it can be troubleshot (in the automotive field this already exists, they don't give you raw source code but they give you the exact sequence of operations under which a trouble code is set - for example, "this DTC is set if the battery voltage goes below 11V for 2 seconds" or oscilloscope waveforms of raw sensor signals) and a ban on bullshit restrictions in the name of "security" such as the binding of Touch ID buttons to the mainboard.