Not assurances that if they meet their funding goal they'll open source. Not a pinky promise to open source in the future. Not magnanimous decision by upper management to open source if the business fails.

It's open sourcing from the outset so that people who invest in their technology can be assured they've fulfilled their promise to the community.

Pay for products that produce open source software and hardware. Pay artists that put out libre/free work. Demand projects that ask for money and "will open source in the future" open source now before taking your money.

In my view, finger wagging at corporate entities not open sourcing their products after end-of-life amounts to posturing.

This concept works fine for the author's example of a kitchen scale, but fails when the device in question is something like a router that has secure boot with one key burned into e-fuses.

In that case we need both open software and a requirement that the manufacturer escrow signing keys with someone so that after EOL any software can be run.

But I don't know if there is a pragmatic way to approach that. I mean, I could also say "it should be illegal to produce e-waste", but what does that mean and how do we actually do it?

Can you imagine if UBNT had to open source its EOL boot chain, so that Cambium was legally entitled to roll its firmware for old Unifi kit? And Vice Versa?

The result might not be "Old hardware supported by the community" the result might be "Eternal product updates so we can legally prevent Cambium from taking our customers"

The actual proposal in this blog doesn’t make much sense. Having the specs of a device isn’t going to change much because they can be determined by anyone examining the PCB. Most devices don’t have a simple connection protocol, like the Spotify Car Thing used as an example.

I was just playing around with home automation, and I have built quite a few custom devices over the past few months.

Just to illustrate what I mean:

I have an old furnace - it's interface is literally: pull this pin down to ground and the furnace starts up. It's incredibly easy to work with. Later furnaces from this manufacturer have some proprietary protocol that seems very difficult to interface with, from what I gathered from the internet.

But, even yet more modern versions support the standardized OpenTherm protocol and is very hackable again.

Something else: Hardware tends to be amortized away into a commodity. A ton of modern devices essentially run on ESP32s, raspberry Pis (or some other open SoC) or smartphone hardware with Android.

I (and others have) just started hacking around with an ESP32-S3 based HMI - it's and LCD screen married to and ESP32-S3, integrated into a very nice case with a small touch screen panel. I was able to whip up a custom professional looking GUI in a couple weekends and integrate it into my (fully local, open source, HA-based) home automation system. It runs ESPHome and uses LVGL to draw the UI.

I've had friends over and they remarked about how nice it looked, and asked about the brand and were suprised when I told them I hacked it together. It looks good enough that you could sell it and works very well.

https://nolongerevil.com/

Repurposing bricked Nest Gen 1 & 2 thermostats with custom software. Giving old hardware new life through open source innovation. No Longer Evil is a right-to-repair firmware and cloud replacement for Nest Thermostats that frees your device from Google’s cloud dependency. By flashing custom firmware, your thermostat will operate independently and connect to No Longer Evil’s platform (or your own self-hosted server), giving you complete control over your device data and settings.

This is more achievable as code itself is often shared across multiple devices, some not EOL, and often not even owned by the HW producer but licensed under non FOSS compatible terms.

Mediatek devices are beyond hope, but some could be saved this way that are otherwise trash.

- this also extends to software

- when it has been 25 yrs since a game has released, you are no longer making money from your game big time

- companies should be forced to open source their games at this point in time

- so that we can revive games that companies like ubisoft keep shutting down and removing from steam libraries completely

If the company disappears... what happens to the devices and the cloud storage?

I've been really enjoying the product (it's really well done, the mobile app works perfectly well) but it's a scary thought.

I also found this Reddit thread [1] with some language from the company supposedly saying they would do their best to launch alternative tooling if they disappeared, but I can't find this language anywhere else online.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45341781

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/1b8vei3/wha...

That might actually be good for security. If APIs must be public, proper cloud security becomes necessary (rather than relying on obscurity).

There are already plenty of devices, from old phones to vacuum robots, where we have that or near enough.

Technically, we know how we could maintain/re-flash these devices.

Yet, we don't. Why? lack of standardization, specially the boot process in non-x86 platforms.

Having to maintain per device images is not really practical at scale.

There are two major things that undermine this for software: copyright durations, and lack of source code. Software copyright durations should be at most a few years, and to be eligible for copyright, software should have its source code published or at minimum held in escrow, so that when the copyright expires it is still useful.

We already require patents to be published in exchange for the protection we give them; software copyright needs to be the same.

It is if you buy carefully: I don't buy hardware that can't be used with linux or whatever I deem necessary. And then, there's the car...

Also, "end of life" is hard to define. Does it mean not being produced, ordered or sold? After how many days, months, etc.?

The economics of leasing vs buying are well understood by the general public. Allow them to make an honest decision at the time of purchase.

Have you tried pointing an LLM agent at a decompiled apk? It could probably write you protocol docs for it.

...although it could be "no more product support, talk to random people on github"

actually, don't know why there couldn't be legislative or tax support for these kinds of things.

Moreover if the hardware is composite, that should apply to its components.

There must be international legal minimum standards of post-sales support and EOL archival caretaking to really reduce e-waste and allow things people paid for to endure rather than forced planned obsolescence like cloud-side or update-based bricking. The corrosive consumer mindset of "new, new, new"; fragile, undocumented, closed-source, short-life tech; and throwing away expensive things is absurd.

Browsed top commenters' site. Only outlier is abetusk here who has his hobbyist stuff available openly, but nothing professional.

I don't get it. Why don't any of you guys do the thing you want others to do? Be the change you want to see in the world.

I'd be fine if manufacturers had to have some kind of standard "nutrition facts" label of what will happen to its functionality if support is ended.

the app used to store data for up to 5 users to keep track over time. I miss that!

What? Was it storing the data on a cloud server? In that case it's a different story, but a local app should continue working essentially indefinitely.

All this focus on source code is IMHO missing the point. RMS also missed this point when he started the GNU project. Source code is neither necessary nor sufficient for (legal) freedom. They just need to relinquish the copyright and release any keys and such getting in the way. Lots of examples otherwise --- I'll refer you to the cracking scene, game modding, etc.

In the physical world, products can be "EOL" for decades and the aftermarket will fill in the void if there is demand, often even when the original product is still in production. The original manufacturer never released blueprints and other comparable-to-source-code information; they just don't try to stop the aftermarket. Mid-century cars are a great example of this.

tl;dr: stop demanding source code, start demanding freedom.

I love to see this future but knowing this, company would never do this

In simple terms, if a company has a continuum of products of a certain category over time, the designs (hardware, software, manufacturing, testing, etc.) are typically evolutionary in nature.

This means that product B inherits from product A, C from B, etc. When product C goes to market, A and B might be EOL. Open sourcing anything related to product C means relinquishing their intellectual property.

Nobody in their right mind would do that unless a unique set of conditions are in place to have that make sense. In general terms, this does not happen.