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Comment by ghevshoo | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunate it’s limited to cars

and it makes it much easier in court to argue that we already have it for cars, why not computers, phones and washing machines.

and software.

I wonder what the equivalent would look like for software. Open-source obviously, but what does a "right to repair" look like for a SAAS app? It sounds like this rule is mainly about accessing information about the vehicle so maybe requirements to allow consumers to export their data in a reasonable format.

A right to repair for software would be substantially similar to open source, perhaps with restrictions on commercial use, although in the car space, a right to repair is mostly about giving commercial repairers access, so maybe in software it would just mean mandating all software be open source :)

Edit: perhaps the commercial case could be limited to sharing a copy with a consultant, having them do the repair job, give you back the code and then delete their copy.

For service as a software substitute (SaaSS), I guess if you should have the right to extract your data too.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

You can repair what you own.

Most commercial software is rented, not owned. Your iPhone's hardware is yours, but the iOS it runs is Apple's, and whatever runs in the baseband processor may belong to some third parties like Qualcomm.

But if you own a copy of software, you usually can patch it to your heart's content. Selling patched copies may be a different deal. (Of course, easy with open source.)

Not a US ruling but in the EU courts in 2012 upheld that copyright exhaustion happens even if a piece of software is "licensed not sold". Though many questions still remain and the ruling is pretty old now. [1]

Seems there was also some movement on this in France in 2019[2], though a french ruling I don't see why the same implementation wouldn't be applicable to all EU states based on the above.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_license#Ownership_vs.... [2]https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-19-french-court-valve-steam...

In court? What are you talking about?

Small moves, Ellie. Small moves.

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