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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I am sympathetic toward the idea. However:

> a company should be required by law to provide their source code to a government agency that holds it in escrow

The reality is that a lot of code can be licensed from third parties, and there's no moral principle by which it would be right to expose and open-source their code.

So I'm really not sure how workable or useful this would actually be.

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When the end of Spotify Car Thing was announced this is what I expected. I thought these perfectly good devices had been built on license encumbered libraries that would prohibit open sourcing the code, and that all those hardware devices would go to waste. Thankfully that was not the case, but most of the time it is. It's amazing how much licensing controls how software is used, and thus how much systems and software designers should consider the license of the libraries and frameworks they choose.

This objection only applies to past products. If the law in a big enough market required that sort of code escrow and eventual release, companies wouldn't build future products covered by that law on top of code they couldn't release.

You'd have to have some practical "ramp up" times, but anything that has been written can be written again.

It could eventually result in the third-party libraries being fully replaced (good value) or them adapting so that they update their libraries yearly - sure you can get the 3 year old one open-source, but do you want to?

id ran into this with the sound code for Doom, and Carmack regrets it (though I'm not sure they had many other practical options, they could have at least contracted for a distribution license which wouldn't need to be open source).

> The reality is that a lot of code can be licensed from third parties, and there's no moral principle by which it would be right to expose and open-source their code.

This doesn't mean that they would have to expose somebody else's code, they would just have to use something else (or write their own)

Wouldn't the third parties be subject to the requirement as well?

What if they're in a different jurisdiction?

How does that apply when you're releasing the source code in the jurisdiction where the law requires it? If they sue you there, the law there says they lose. If you're also in the other jurisdiction your subsidiary there doesn't have to release it so they don't. This is like, what happens when a work is in the public domain in one jurisdiction but not another? The answer is different things happen in different places.

Also, obviously companies would then just not license software under terms that would cause legal trouble for them.

>How does that apply when you're releasing the source code in the jurisdiction where the law requires it?

That would depend on what exactly the requirement is and what exactly the third-party code is and is used for. Without the specifics, I'd say it seems plausible that the third party itself is not subject to the requirement but the firmware using the third-party code may be subject for both first- and third-party code.

But then why is that a problem? The entity in the jurisdiction releases the code for the device they sell in the jurisdiction, whether they wrote it or licensed it, and doesn't license it under terms inconsistent with their legal obligation.

Either they follow the law or it is illegal to sell in the covered jurisdiction.

There are already US laws that work in that way. Consider DDT, if fruit was grown with DDT you can't sell it in the US. It doesn't matter that DDT is legal in the grower's country.

Taken as given the statement in the parent that "there's no moral principle by which it would be right to expose and open-source their code.", then that sort of transitive requirement ought not be imposed. Though I don't agree with that statement.

Identifying all of the owners of licensed code is a difficult problem all by itself. It's not always clear that third party code is even used in a product as any identification or licensing information is lost at compile-time. Some licensed code is only delivered as pre-compiled libraries so a licensee couldn't even comply with a law requiring all source code submitted for escrow.

That's surely a detail for the producer to figure out. Don't sell software if it's not legal to sell!

Easier said than done with deadlines, managers, and incentives

That's part of the issue, such software is not illegal to sell compiled binaries by the licensee. It is however illegal for them to redistribute licensed source/headers/documentation. They can't turn over the source because they don't own it, merely license it. Quite a bit of closed source software uses closed source licensed libraries with proscribed terms of redistribution. Untold number of embedded devices use closed source licensed dev kits the licensee has no power to redistribute themselves.

> That's part of the issue, such software is not illegal to sell compiled binaries by the licensee.

It would be under the proposed law, which is basically the point of the proposed law. Closed software is only closed because the (regulated) market enforces its being closed, even if it's contrary to the interests of everyone but the producer of said software. The point of said regulation would be to give a (regulated) market incentive to provide actually free software. Hardware manufacturers should not rely on software moats to stay afloat!

And of course with a "free market", people would be buying bricks in boxes thinking they're buying routers or cameras.

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