Hacker News Reader

Comment by cafxx | Hacker News Reader

Strongly agree, and I would add that if the object in question has any networking capability even the firmware should be open sourced - otherwise the first serious security vulnerability immediately makes said object unfit for purpose and - therefore - obsolete.

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. Unless, that is, such innovation is a red herring and the new product is a mere repackaging of the same, old technology, done exclusively for the sake of artificially sustaining cash flow.

View on HN

"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.

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.

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.

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%!

It's only faulty if you look at it through very narrow lens. Not every company has FAANG (or even VC backed startup) level of funding to support these kinds of efforts. Telling a small business that they are going to be breaking the law if they don't sit down and open source all of the code for a project they have decided to abandon is preposterous.

A penalty large enough to impact the companies you care about here would be business destroying to a small organization. Individuals and companies are not going to want to assume that kind of liability. I don't see how anyone could support this kind of measure if they are thinking about the breadth of business out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com