Hacker News Reader

Comment by enos_feedler | Hacker News Reader

that would put a lot of obligation on the vendor to honor some kind of contract they don't need to do today. They can change anything they want with zero cost today.

View on HN

Does documentation necessarily create such an obligation? That would jeopardize most open-source projects, most of which explicitly promise no warranty.

Isn’t a warranty of merchantability thing? If something is described as doing X, and you take X away, you’ve taken value from my property.

Which makes an excellent case for mandatory docs.

I don't want my speakers to stop working because I stopped paying subscription.

As long as they are "your" speakers. Subscription sounds like you're renting speakers. I know that's probably a facetious/pedantic point but it strikes to the heart of the fact that we should be calling for more accurate description of the relationship between a consumer and the hardware they acquire i.e. calling a spade a spade. You're not buying a laptop, or an M1 CPU in a metal case. You're buying a magic Apple service delivery box that happens to permit certain other uses. Customer expectations should match description should match function.

I say this as a longstanding iPhone user, and up until recently, Mac user.

The big issue with this is apple does not own all of the IP in a any of their hardware, much of it is a mixture of licenses from many vendors some of it owned by apple much of it just licensed.

Apples licenses for these will include very strict NDA clauses that make it impossible for apple to share the documentation they are provided but that vendor.

Apple has moved much of the stack completely in-house, that point is relatively moot.

So those NDAs become void. Excellent.

Not a legal obligation but a support obligation. Documenting implies stability of an API. It says, use this thing we intend for you to use. Usually, you mark an API as deprecated, and often provide an alternative, before removing it.

Sometimes backwards compatibility is preserved even to the point of preserving bugs (especially if the companies/apps depending on it are large):

https://www.triplefault.io/2017/07/breaking-backwards-compat...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/11/ars-investigates-doe...

They could change what they want afterwards too presumably, they'd just need to publish the new documentation along side it.

This is what Intel/AMD have done for multiple generations of their GPU hardware now for a decade or more. Hasn't stopped them from innovating. Nvidia has PTX with a proprietary steam assembler underneath which can retarget any hardware changes. Either way, Apple can offer more documentation than it currently does.

> that would put a lot of obligation on the vendor to honor some kind of contract they don't need to do today. They can change anything they want with zero cost today.

So why can't we just allow them to keep making those changes, but still have to document them? I'm sure they document them internally anyway.

We could have a tax on documents which are non-public.

For example, the tax could be 1 cent per page per day which is non-public.

It would apply to source code, images, or anything else that might be reasonably printed on a page.

Then companies could pay the government to keep their employees work secret, or publish it.

It should help innovation as far more work done by humans gets made available for others to build from.

That's an interesting idea! Do you know if anyone has explored this further?

It will only make products more expensive and less accessible and people still won't be able to fully use _their_ devices.

Except it won't - companies which are fully open source won't have any additional costs, and their products can be priced the same as normal.

It's only companies who have fully closed tech will have to pay the tax, and really that tax is compensating the rest of the country for the work and knowledge that company wants to keep secret.

That might happen to some products, yes. No different from any other tax. I don't see a fundamental problem.

Zero cost to them perhaps. However, those costs often prove quite high for others.

Right now increasing numbers of things are, "works until it doesn't" and that imposes risks and costs to everyone.

Perhaps those get high enough to warrant legislative solutions.

No, this applies only to APIs, which are documented as such. The users of such APIs might have a certain expectation of long-term support. This is talking about documentation of the device which is sold, the software equivalent of providing schematics to eletrical devices. Which for a long time was quite common. You could buy stereo amplifiers with complete schematics. They don't create an obligation that future products have the same schematics, their purpose is solely for the repair of the device sold.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com