Comment by dpkonofa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpkonofa | Hacker News Reader

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I hate to be that guy but this sounds very much like "old man recounts tales of how things were 'back in my day' to youngsters". The Apple II was not anywhere near as complex as the computers and devices we're talking about now and it wasn't wrapped up in the patents and chip licenses that nearly every piece of technology today is wrapped up in. You can't even have a DSP (digital signal processor) that would be repairable or that you could include schematics for without vioating any number of patents held by third-parties or patent trolls (and I'm not, in any way, saying that patent trolls aren't the spawn of the devil).

Apple wanted to make FaceTime open sourced and they couldn't because of a patent troll. I don't even think we can get into the complexity of today's hardware systems without running into any number of reasons why that stuff can't be "open-sourced". It's great that super-techy people want to be able to repair their own devices (and there's no reason currently why you can't) so I feel like the current right to repair movement, and especially people like Louis Rossman, are doing a huge disservice to the ideas behind people's actual rights to repair devices they buy when they conflate them with "open-source" and completely ignore the fact that 99% of people don't care.

Unless they find a way to show people what the upsides and downsides of the current situation are objectively, they're never going to get the support they need. As it stands, they're being misleading at best and downright lying at worst to try and push a narrative that gets to the end goal and, as soon as the lies come out, it'll push the momentum backwards instead of carrying it forward. The number of people with expertise to actually fix most of these issues with these complex devices is incredibly small and dwindling and opening that up to anyone and everyone without some kind of plan in place is just going to spectacularly backfire.

One thing we tend to forget is that not everybody lives in the US, there’s a lot of places where repairs are a thing and techs do magic with almost nothing but they need to resource to piracy for information and to black market for replacement parts.

While this is definitely true, I think it's less of an issue than we might think at first glance. There's nothing currently that would prevent a repair shop from repairing a device or sourcing parts from other devices. Even if we're talking about Apple devices or even Sony devices, there needs to be a balance between repairability and access. Back when the Apple II was released, the internet didn't really exist so someone's issues or complaints with a device were pretty localized. Now, someone with enough social followers can create a PR nightmare for a company based on something that's totally out of that company's control so it's no surprise that no one wants to open up that Pandora's box.

I'm fascinated by the fact that people like Louis Rossmann are both the perfect example of why Right to Repair should work while at the same time being an amazing example of why the current versions of R2R can't work.

>There's nothing currently that would prevent a repair shop from repairing a device or sourcing parts from other devices.

It can be done, but it is a huge waste.

Take the A1989 Macbook. Let's say you bring it in because it stops charging. It's 2019. It's dead. Let's pretend I am a normal repair shop, and not someone with youtube fame that can find someone at intersil/renesas that can get me chips.

Let's say the ISL9240 charging chip dies.

I can, in theory, do my research, and find out that the iPhone XR charging case uses the same chip. I can buy that charging case for $100+, disassemble it, locate the ISL9240, remove it, reball it, and replace it on the customer's logic board.

but......this is insane.

a) I have to waste a battery charging case, including the lithium battery.

b) I am adding $100+ to the repair cost since I have to stock & sell this case now just to get a chip.

c) I have to do research to figure out what other device on the market uses this chip, on top of the work of figuring out what is wrong on a complex 5+ layer PCB.

The viability of this repair, for a shop that needs to get their customer in & out in a day or two for them to remain satisfied, goes out the window almost immediately.

>Even if we're talking about Apple devices or even Sony devices, there needs to be a balance between repairability and access.

What does this actually mean? What is the downside to this chip being made available for sale, so that when the device fails it can be repaired? What are we balancing here?

>Now, someone with enough social followers can create a PR nightmare for a company based on something that's totally out of that company's control so it's no surprise that no one wants to open up that Pandora's box.

It is 100% within the company's control whether or not they want this part to be available; the reason it cannot be sold to anyone is because they make it that way.

>I'm fascinated by the fact that people like Louis Rossmann are both the perfect example of why Right to Repair should work while at the same time being an amazing example of why the current versions of R2R can't work.

Where is the argument in favor of why this cannot work, and how I am example of it? Where is the citation? How is it for decades parts and chips were made available with zero problems and now it can be asserted that this "can't work" with no explanation?

This increasingly feels like someone's throwing poo at the wall in the hopes of finding something that sticks.

I'm not sure I understand why a schematic would violate a patent. As far as I'm aware, patents do not exist to make information secret, but to provide a temporary exclusive legal right in exchange for making the information public.

A schematic, in and of itself, may not violate a patent but providing a means for someone to create a part that requires software that's patented may open up people and companies to litigation that would kill them. Qualcomm, for example, holds patents for any number of chips that are in mobile devices from any tech company. A phone manufacturer, more than likely, wouldn't be able to provide schematics for their device that would include any details of how to repair that chip without having to defer to Qualcomm as it itself is only licensing that technology for production of their devices. Patents provide that exclusive legal right but, in most cases, don't extend that right to licensees. The whole situation is a mess.

I don't think you're correctly understanding what is being asked for, and even if you do, I don't your analysis is correct.

First of all, nobody is asking for detailed instructions on how to produce all the parts from some base level. A schematic is only really going to show a level deeper. It would be plenty useful just knowing what connects where, and why. Meanwhile the actual knowledge to produce the part from scratch isn't even that useful in terms of repair unless the scale is rather massive.

Secondly, I'm not aware of any reason it would be so terribly illegal to tell somebody how to violate a patent. The whole point of the patent system is to let people know how to do exactly what the patent is for - but in exchange the creator gets a temporary legal means of preventing others from actually doing it. The actual means of violating a patent are inherently public - otherwise the patent could not exist in the first place.

So I have no idea how Qualcomm would sue anybody out of existence for telling people information that is already public. Of course this is limited to patents. There may be other aspects in play that would result in secret information that could not be distributed. But patents are not it.

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