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Listen to any pro-gun advocate: the goal is not to kill the bad guy, the goal is to stop the bad guy… though unfortunately sometimes this means reducing their b
by loup-vaillant 3y ago
Listen to any pro-gun advocate: the goal is not to kill the bad guy, the goal is to stop the bad guy… though unfortunately sometimes this means reducing their blood pressure to zero.
The law as I propose it would not legally force Apple to split. They would have 3 alternatives: stop selling software, stop selling hardware, or split. They could fire half the company, but we all know what they would actually do. Same deals with banks: enforcing the separation between deposit and investment wouldn't force the banks to split, but we all know that in practice they would.
Understand here that splitting Apple is not my goal. My goal is to separate the activities, in the hope of fostering more competition and personal freedom.
- robertlagrant 3y agoBut how would that actually work? Two companies have an agreement to work together and share specs between themselves?
- loup-vaillant 3y agoActually no that would defeat the point. There are a couple thing we need to do beyond separating hardware and software: the first is forbidding NDAs around hardware interfaces. If you sell hardware to someone, you cannot force them not to publish the manual. The second is an interoperability mandate: reproducing the functionality of existing hardware (a CPU ISA, a GPU clone…) must be authorized, and all relevant copyright and patents ignored. This doesn’t mean that we would end all partnerships. The hardware company can still send prototypes to the software company, so driver development can begin before the hardware gets production-ready. That kind of workflow is common today.
- robertlagrant 3y agoSo...why bother with the separation? Why not just publish the specs and let people copy your hardware work and be done?