Hey, EU should introduce a requirement that full technical documentation, diagnostic manuals, and assembly drawings of any electronic device be made public the moment its manufacturer stops offering service.
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This isn't even an impossible requirement, all electronics/electrical goods used to come with such documentation as standard so people could repair it easily or take it to a third party repair shop.
It's only really from the 1990s(?) onwards that this was dropped.
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@riley It seems like a logical next step after other rights afforded to users. Like reverse engineering computer programs (which includes firmware) to ensure compatibility or fixing it, should the vendor not provide documentation (or there being like a maintenance contract, c.f. Directive 2009/24/EC Articles 5 & 6 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A32009L0024 ). Vendors should provide this on request unless there is a very good reason not to.
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And before the device can be sold a copy of that material should be sent to an independent third party who can publish it if the original company for some reason does not.
There also needs to be some arrangement which will allow whistleblowers to realize before publication if the material in question is incomplete or inaccurate.
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@riley and if there was software (firmware, drivers, whatever...) involved, it should be made open-source.
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@0x6f Actually, it should be a separate requirement that chips can only publicly sold in EU if their full documentation is also public. No NDAs for publicly marketed chips!
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@riley Okay. So if I can kill a business, their IP becomes public domain? Why would I ever buy a struggling business or orphaned product/service? And why would a company ever officially retire or EOL a product instead of making it crappy or unaffordable?
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@evanwolf You speak like businesses are people, worth keeping alive just because.
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@riley I would prefer the thing South Korea does with manuals; you can't sell this in their territory until the manuals are in the depository library. (Generally making the docs available online to anyone.) When you stop offering the device or service or whichever, the documentation goes into the public domain. (And as I understand it, resuming sale won't pull the docs back out of public domain.)
TL;DR it's not legal for sale until the full documentation package is in the depository library.
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@graydon Hey, what about the details of the MIPI DSI/CSI interfaces of the display panels manufactured by Samsung?
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@riley When I dealt with it twenty years ago, the Korean version applied to complete consumer products like phones and graphics cards. I would assume that a panel as a commercial part sold to people who make monitors isn't covered by the Korean law.
I would not myself be adverse to extending such a law to components but it is a much more complicated subject; I'd want to go with "some, get more later" because even the consumer version of such a law is going to be a challenge.
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@graydon So, how does it help in repairing stuff that uses these panels as replacement parts?
Display panels are rather fragile, so replacing them is a pretty common right-to-repair case.
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@riley There's a difference between "right to repair" and "required to document".
Full right-to-repair requires things like guarantees of parts availability, which is a whole lot larger and more contentious than a requirement to document. What I thought I was talking about was the (generally not that contentious until people notice documentation does involve costs) requirement to document.
Which has value and would be an improvement over what we have now, even if it's not full right-to-repair.
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@riley I like iFixit and I think repairing over replacing has much to recommend it but really generalizing it involves way more structural change than is generally recognized.
A general right-to-repair is inconsistent with individuals as primary economic actors; nigh-all purchases would need to be made the way some militaries do, which purchase the thing and lifetime spare parts for the thing together and keeps the spares in a supply system thereafter. It runs up the sticker price.
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F [email protected] shared this topic
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@riley and bootloader signing keys! but I'm afraid manufacturers would then do the bare minimum so that their devices are never considered "out of service" and they don't have to release anything
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@riley Maybe something too about a requirement for source code / datasets / configs (Helm scripts etc) to be held in escrow in case the company folds? Especially relevant for things like medical devices / implants, vehicles and other heavily regulated tech sectors, but really any "smart" devices.
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@graydon Consider that repair-as-a-service is a thing. Making sure that electronics manufacturers do not kick independent repair services out of the market by anticompetitive means — such as deliberately obfuscating the interfaces needed to run diagnostics or fit third-party replacement parts into a device — falls straight into the European Union's focus interest of enabling an efficient and competitive market system.
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@FediThing JEDEC has been for decades, since the era of thermionic valves, issuing common recommendations for things such as voltage tolerances and component pinouts, making all sorts of parts made by many different manufacturers interoperable with each other and allowing for unprecedented growth of the electronics industry. Unfortunately, these days, JEDEC has been shirking its jurisdiction in some areas — such as display and camera interface protocols. The MIPI Alliance, for one, has infringed on its turf, and has been enforcing a different, secrecy-based, culture, which gets in the way of interoperability and harms competition.
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@m In many fields, blueprints, or design specification, make more sense than the specific source code. For example, if your laptop's polycarbonate case should break, it's more useful to have the STL that the original case was designed after rather than the specific G-Code for the specific device that engraved the original ABS press's mold. The G-Code is hard to reuse; the STL, which doesn't specify the tool paths but the expected form, so it can be cut or otherwise modified and fed into a suitable 3D printing process — a very different technology, with different idiosyncrasies — is more conducive to facilitating repairs.
But medical devices are a special case, indeed: with them, the source code should probably be mandatorily available.
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@m A related special case is cloud-based games.
In these cases, it probably doesn't make sense to transfer the responsibility to maintain the cloud to a government service, and a more reasonable sundown procedure would be defining a mechanism whereby an organisation of players can take the responsibility to run the cloud over from the company that doesn't want to run it anymore.
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@riley Doesn't seem so crazy given that the US FDIC and EU DORA both strongly suggest (read: eventually will require) source code escrow agreements when banking orgs buy software.
Lots of enterprise/missing-critical tech companies already escrow their code for big customers. Think banks, hospitals, defense.
In the agreements I've dealt with, that escrow includes things like build instructions.
