Devices that rely on cloud infrastructure should be required to carry an expiration date right on the box. "This item guaranteed to receive support until XX/XX/XX"
(That's before the blindingly obvious observation that even something provided by the government at no cost at point of use has a cost which is ultimately borne by the people.)
I think we'd also need to figure out some durable and stable way to reach a conclusion on "when should the software be published out of escrow?" that handles a bunch of the various edge cases. "What happens to devices that are one-time programmable? What devices are in-scope/out-of-scope? Does this apply to radio firmware as well as general CPU firmware? Is the software license changed alongside the release of code from escrow? Are signing keys also released? Is code released from escrow just because some individual use case is no longer supported by the mainline firmware? [Is a disagreement with a product decision enough to release the old code?]"
It's too expensive and too unlikely to succeed, but I could sue Chamberlain now arguing that they have breached an implied contract and that the remedy I seek is for them to open-source their code.
Best case, I think you'd get your purchase price back. I'm not sure how you'd argue that remedy is insufficient, either - hence why my preference is to have the cause of action written into the law we're imagining here. It'd be even better if we can write in that the remedy for a degradation of the service is an open mechanism by which the user has sufficient level of control as to recreate their desired functionality.
The second year there is much less work but they double the cost. You go along with that as it takes a lot of work on your part to engage a new escrow firm from scratch.
The next year they double it again. It's still demanded by your large corporate customers and you try to pass on the costs but they don't want to pay it.
That internet connection for cloud services for smart gear always costs someone.
Smart home devices that can’t be locally hosted or easily made to be locally hosted should be avoided.
There’s no reason a light switch that normally works for 10-20 years will only work for 2-5 due to cloud connectivity.
Luckily for the time being a lot of the providers can be reflashed with Tuyo based firmwares.
The same for software. Even Microsoft is going fully Cloud. Just had problems to activate my MS Office for Mac Business 2019, which I bought in physical. They now require on @outlook.com email address to be able to activate. Otherwise I can't use my "box" software.
Outside of activation, it is easy to use MS Office for Mac completely offline -- there's a checkbox for that in preferences. You will lose some marginal functionality, some of which I prefer to be disabled (like generating pdfs of your documents server-side instead of client-side).
It took me almost 3 days to find the problem. Microsoft changed that and between all "answers" there is only one single thread in the Microsoft forums that had the solution.
Some years ago, I activated some Office licenses using my company email; we never did any hosting with O365 or whatever was it's predecessor, and at the time, everything went fine. All I had to do was to create live account using that email address.
Which means, that you need to associate your existing account with an @outlook.com address. It seems, that Microsoft changed that requirement somewhere in 2020/2021.
Yes, previously Microsoft account with whatever email address was enough. But they changed that.
I stumbled upon that while upgrading to new hardware, which requires new activation of the Office products.
The Gaben has spoke: "piracy is more about convenience than price"
Just do it. You won't regret it. I also bought office 2016 cheap at some point in time. That's even better. Faster, nicer UI.. just to give you feedback xD
This was like 7+ years ago.