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Comment by nathanvanfleet | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty common, I bought a really nice looking scale that was machined aluminum and had no screen from Community Thrift. It was $5 but only when I got home did I realize it was some app-first company that had closed. So it was a brick. I've also seen things like Lighthouse (?) that was a really nice IP security cam with the same fate. IMO the coolest thing would be if these companies would open-source their code when they went out of business.

But in all likelihood that is probably a legal issue. Companies don't just go out of business, they sell IP to something and ultimately some other company probably ends up owning it all and they probably don't want to share anything.

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If the governments of the world can force companies as large as Apple to move to USB-C to reduce e-waste, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that they could demand open sourcing of software as part of a company’s wind-down.

You can't force someone to open up their intellectual property. The company might have wound down but the IP still belongs to someone.

Easy: legislate an implied obligation for ongoing support of past sales for a reasonable period of time and as part of wind down that obligation is a liability that must be discharged with posted credit of some sort (or the purchaser would have to take this liability on) or via open sourcing the software.

Fair point. That's called a warranty, and they should have been legally required to support their product until the end of warranty period. Posting a notice on their website in June and shutting down the servers in September is a jerk move.

My point still stands though. They can't force them to open up their trade secrets.

Are you sure about that?

If the government can make a law that says someone can't sell a particular product (Like say, children's toys with razor blades in them) why can't the government pass a law that says that if a company sells a particular catagory of product then the company must open the product up if they discontinue the product or go out of business?

All laws are social contracts. Of course they could force them to open up their trade secrets. It wouldn't even to be something extreme, Congress could just pass a law saying "discontinuing a commercial product requires publishing everything needed to maintain that product", and that would be that.

> You can't force someone to open up their intellectual property. The company might have wound down but the IP still belongs to someone.

You can't, but governments can. There are laws that protect IP; those laws could be modified to say that, if you decide to stop supporting a product that relies on your IP, then you must provide the means for individual users to support it themselves. That doesn't even have to mean giving up your IP; it could just mean designing from the beginning with the idea that a company won't last forever—but that'll never happen unless it's forced by law.

Source code escrow agreements are reasonably common. When a startup receives an investment from BigCo, it comes with the condition that BigCo gets a perpetual license to the source code / IP if the startup fails.

It would be straightforward to mandate such agreements be included with all IoT device purchases.

Ideally, they'd also be triggered by acquisitions or modifications to privacy policies. I can dream, right?

Probably the best we can hope for is that when these companies go belly up, an insider leaks out the code.

For the scale, it probably uses a standard load cell (or multiple) - there are cheap boards available which will let you use the hardware you bought.

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