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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@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.
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@FediThing
As a kid I used to tinker with old valve ratios from junk shops and jumble sales. It was quite common to find a circuit diagram glued inside the cabinet. Tricky with complex microelectronics in tiny enclosures but putting them online should be standard.
@riley -
RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaistreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
requirement for full technical documentation [when a company stops offering a product or upon ots demise]...
This is known as Escrow. The company I worked for had BIG companies and the government as clients, and were required to do this in many contracts. Updating escrow yearly was a pain, but it actually brought internal insights. One insight was that I feel sorry for the poor sod tasked to make the software work on the demise of the company and its infrastructure.
Let's not forget that when a company dies, the IP and copyrights are assets. It's more complicated than one would think.
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@sfwrtr You should test rebuild from the escrowed code like you test recovery from your backups.
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like jam or bootlacesreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
Possible options:
Release the docs with the product
️or
Pay an annual subscription for them to be held in escrow, to be released when payment ceases due to any variety of corporate shenanigans.
️Optional: Loss or inadequacy of docs is covered by some sort of bond to pay for reverse engineering to make up the deficit.
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Panegyr :ms_clown:replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley something I want to do if I ever release a electrical doohickey for sale is embed the specifications and design files in an onboard ROM chip to be freely accessed by anyone tinkering with it
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