John Deere hit with class action lawsuit over alleged tractor repair monopoly
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The question in the air in these cases is whether Deere, Apple, etc. are violations of specific anti-trust laws -- the language of those law is intentionally open-ended, and there isn't a ton of case-law. Thus, these cases have a high chance of setting precedent.
Now, it seems that what you're suggesting is that we should be able to punish companies, people, etc for being "bad" just because we know it's "bad." This sort of "justice" is literally arbitrary, and leads to incredible injustices. The closest remedies we have as a people, if this behavior is found to not violate existing anti-trust laws, is to persuade Congress to pass new laws (good luck), pass a constitutional amendment (nope), or to wage a class-action suit (here's your gift certificate for a can of beans).
+1. I expect stuff like this from regular social media like reddit but I'm appalled that this is so common here on HN too.
Under your system, there is no way of knowing whether what you are doing is legal or not.
For example, how would you feel if tomorrow you were hauled to jail for incitement toward an ex post facto law? Ex post facto laws are widely recognized as being morally reprehensible. Surely you should have been on notice that it's illegal to push for one, right?
Punishing because it feels right is what I take issue with. Punishing on the basis of a violated law is, at least, above-board.
The right to repair for farmers is about more than the fixing of tractors, it's about fixing tractors ASAP during harvest season when any downtime is unacceptable.
Bullshit.
This is digital logic. One bit off can destroy anything. We don't lock all software behind lock and key because digital logic is digital logic.
Yeah. It's a tractor. So what? One bit off and disk firmware can spin up out of control until the platter shatters, controller overvolts/heats. One bit off and a plane can fly itself into the ground. A race condition and an X-ray fires a lethal beam of hard radiation into a patient. Programs, segfaults, symbol tables, the most mission critical software ever, gains no benefit being locked away from the public. Proprietary standards not publically accessible does nothing but internalize corruption or flaws we build into them until that rare person that can eventually mitigate or raise awareness of their implication comes along and blows the whistle.
I'm tired of the platitudes and arrogance of these corporate malusers of software to manufacture nothing but artificial scarcity, malusers of lobbyists and marketing to manufacture control and credibility with which to steer the masses perception around what is a legitimate use of digital logic. We, and I mean the entirety of the tech industry need to have a moral "Come to <subject of veneratiom>", and acknowledge that by not paying attention to how our employers utilize that which we've made, we have made the world worse for everyone. I can say that that includes everything from juniors to the most crack programmer/hardware designer out there.
The excuses have officially gotten intolerably old and decrepit.
I used to do embedded design, and I'm well aware of many of these practices (eg zip for version control). Opening these systems up will make them drastically more robust.