Re: OT: Huge Right to Repair Win for Consumers
On 6/9/21 10:53 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 6/10/21 2:08 AM, Paul Wise wrote:
>>> The report and its recommendations may provide a means
>>> to pierce the veil of closed platforms, like closed-sourced firmware.
>>
>> It seems unlikely to me that we will ever see a "Right to Repair" for
>> software, firmware or gateware.
>
> So, why should laws protect the intellectual property of software companies
> but not the IP of hardware companies?
Copyright (for software, firmware, etc.) provides all the protection
that's needed.
>
> What supporters euphemistically call a "right to repair" is in reality an
> initiative against the right of companies to protect their intellectual
> property.
>
> Why should any company take the risk of investment for new hardware developments
> when they have to fear that every other company in the world will get free access
> to their blue prints?
Maybe not everything should be for sale. The public Internet wouldn't
be what it is today if the original developers of http had decided to
monetize the new invention. If BSD hadn't decided to give away their
TCP/IP network stack for free, companies like Microsoft wouldn't have
been able to connect their proprietary operating systems to the Internet.
>
> The claim that hardware companies intentionally make it hard to repair consumer
> products is a conspiracy theory. In reality, a consumer product is primarily optimized
> for production costs which implies cheap capacitors or cases that are glued together.
Until just a few years ago, people in the United States weren't even
permitted to unlock their own paid-off cell phones so they could switch
to a different provider. One had to jailbreak an iPhone to install
non-Apple-approved software. When I buy a car, a phone, a computer, or
a DVD, it's mine -- I'm not simply leasing it from the company that
built it or designed it, and I should be able to do whatever I want with
that product.
Here's a more recent example: I've been trying to figure out how to
install a more modern Linux kernel on a PowerMac 6100. More than 20
years ago, Apple teamed up with the now-defunct OSF to use the Mach 3.0
microkernel along with Apple's customized version of a 2.0.33 Linux
kernel to bring Linux to Nubus PowerMacs. This worked until Apple gave
up on the project, and though there was a successful effort to bring a
few 2.4.x Linux kernels (without Mach) to Nubus PowerMacs, that too
died. The thing about Apple's involvement with MkLinux was that they
had no problem modifying Linux kernels, but they weren't willing to make
their "MkLinux Booter" open source (or document how it worked), and
that's really what killed Linux (and NetBSD) for Nubus PowerMacs.
>
> Lots of consumers seem to forget that a product sold into the market not only must
> cover the material costs but also the costs of engineering, marketing, customer
> support, customs, compliance tests and so on. And in the end, you still want there
> to be a small profit left which is what makes the whole business model viable in
> the first place.
Fortunately, Apple was still able to eek out a $13.7 billion profit on a
revenue of 64 billion USD in its fiscal 2019 fourth quarter:
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/30/apple-4q-2019-results/
>
> If law initiatives also now want to take away the exclusive rights of hardware designers
> over their blueprints and hence the market advantage over competitors that they took an
> investment risk for, companies will lose the incentive to design and develop new
> products.
>
> Companies aren't charities so in the end they must protect their investments and have to
> make profits to survive.
Companies that make useful products don't need to "protect their
investments" by failing to provide hardware and software documentation.
Simple copyright is sufficient to prevent mass scale copying (of Mac
ROMS, for example). Apple used to know that providing detailed hardware
information would actually help them sell more products (remember the
Apple II?). Remember the Lexmark printer cartridge lawsuit? Lexmark
tried to lock customers into buying only Lexmark cartridges. And SCO
sued Novell (with Microsoft's backing) in an effort to destroy Linux in
a misguided attempt to protect SCO's so-called "intellectual property."
>
> Adrian
>
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