Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilyt | Hacker News Reader

This is not planned obsolescence tho, this is just "well, we don't sell it anymore so we don't support it". Someone have to pay for the ongoing support. I think the most that should be required from manufacturer is opening up the boot (so alternatives can be EASILY installed), and ship drivers with permissive license.

View on HN

> Someone have to pay for the ongoing support.

It’s a question of incentive. Right now, supporting software is costly for a long time because very little attention is given to making software maintenance cheap.

That’s why it’s reasonable to force company to offer long term support after sells. It means they will have to design software so that it remains viable with a minimum of changes for a long time. Things that don’t make sense today because of their costs like formally proving code and design suddenly become important and as there is an incentive to make it cheaper to be competitive we should see new investments in this field which is currently quite neglected.

Overall it’s a net gain for all of us. In exchange for marginally more expensive computers for a bit (or less profits if that’s how companies want to compete), we will end up with safer more robust software and longer lived appliances.

It would be a major step in the right direction. As someone trained as an engineer, I still think that the software industry tolerance for subpar under-engineered and tested solutions is shameful.

Wouldn't that make things more expensive so that only the rich can continue to be better off?

There is plenty of stuff I cannot afford, and I am perfectly fine with it.

That's not a good rebuttal. The context is $250 laptops that afford students technology literacy for cheap. Not, I can't afford a yacht and I'm ok with it, ergo everyone else can be ok with things they can't afford.

My netbook from 2009 that is still working, was sold with a Linux distribution, and gotten multiple Ubuntu updates, and is still working perfectly fine.

Its price? 300 euros.

So apparently not something that is only for people that can only afford yachtes.

Well, there is some blame to be put on education system for not going open, but chromebooks are significantly less IT maintenance than average linux laptop.

In ideal world it would be non-profit partnering with hardware vendors to produce <educational linux distro> and certify various devices for it. Then non-profit could continue to develop the systems and vendors would have incentive (schools will buy your hardware) to help.

Thankfully the Chromebooks in schools phenomen, is mostly an US school system thing, and as such not a problem in most of the world.

Where parents get to decide what systems their kids use, and mostly with OSes where planned obsolence isn't part of the deal.

The track record in other industry is that it might make things more expensive at first then back to affordable once the engineering solutions have matured. There is a clear incentive for companies in making things cheaper after all. It means both more profits and access to new market segments. That’s the magic of legislation: it can be very effective as a tool to give a direction to research and development.

> we don't sell it anymore so we don't support it

Did you read the article?

“Google could extend the life of these models, most of which are still available for purchase online.”

Yeah I should probably write "does not produce anymore"

Stuff can be on sale for a long time after it stops production (and it isn't necessarily google or even manufacturer selling those)

To me, thats the minimal necessary solution in case of a vendor going bankrupt but there should be a mandatory minimum Support window after the last sale of a device by the manufacturer and that should be non-trivial for security issues (say 10 years).

"And that, my boy, is how we killed the market for hardware startups. We raised the barriers to entry to the point that no one was willing to compete with the giants."

"And that, my boy, is how we figured out that you can make laws that scale with company size, thus keeping hardware startups from that requirement but making sure big megacorps couldn't abuse their market position"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com