I would love to see regulation that required making bootloaders unlockable to enable this sort of thing. People have been making clusters of consumer hardware for decades: I’m sure people remember the PS3 supercomputers of the mid 2000s.
I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a second life. I’m already considering running old servers from e.g ETB but the cycles per watt on a phone are probably much better.
Isn't the story that some gaming consoles were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales? I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked
Yet I 100% agree on a generic computing device and they're not really that different in the end. Maybe that it needs to be unlockable after it has been on the market for 4 years or so (all units, no matter when they were sold, no matter if support ended)
Or maybe undercutting the competition like this to make it back later on games is not a profit model we should want? And that everything should just be unlockable insofar as it has X amount of memory, CPU power, capable of doing IP traffic... something like that. (Seems silly to require a firmware unlock on your toaster)
> Isn't the story that some gaming consoles were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales?
Yes, but I'm confident Android smartphones aren't. Maybe Google is an exception here, but all the other manufacturers profit mostly from the hardware and not from the Apps. Samsung has its own app store, but I think only a tiny minority of users spend money there.
Also for microwaves and dishwashers? That's more the problem I struggle to solve: how to differentiate things that you want to run your own OS on from the things that it would be historically silly to have to provide connectivity and unlocking interfaces for
(On the other hand, our stupid 2026 dishwasher has no flushing program and leaves a ton of residue on the dishes. The 2001 model we inherited from the landlord was perfect, barely used any more power or water but the dishes were actually dry at the end and you could eat from them without ingesting detergent. I wouldn't mind inserting a little rinse cycle in the eco program if there were some documented way of talking to the chip, then for drying we can just let them sit in the opened machine for the remaining 20 hours of the day. Alas. Maybe I should want open source everything!)
Also, what's EOL? When it goes out of warranty after 2 years?
There are countries that require published material to be submitted to a national archive[0]. A similar system could be done for software source code and made public on expiry.
You factor in the expense of having your code releases escrowed by a third party (where part of the escrow contract itself is: "must be buildable from sources as provided"), and have a post-release pipeline that automatically uploads the new version. At the end of the term, the escrow holder releases all the versions.
This is a fairly common arrangement in high finance. If you want to supply services to a bank/insurer/etc. they will typically require an escrow arrangement as a contingency plan against you as a vendor going away. And yes, they pay the escrow costs.
So if I have software on my website and you pay for it and you’re in some European country that has this law then you (who?) can sue me for not uploading all my builds to what? some s3 endpoint?
No, it's not that way around. And it's not a law.[ß] If you and a high-finance institution agree to a separate (lawyer-negotiated!) contract where you provide essential/important software to the institution, they quite often require code escrow arrangements as part of the deal.
There are a few such services around, usually owned by a giant global consulting house.
The idea is that if you as a vendor go out of business or otherwise become unable to maintain the software, the finance institution gets access to the software via the escrow. Importantly, they also gain the contractual and legal rights to further maintain (read: modify) the software.
Under such contract the vendor has an obligation to upload periodic code releases to the escrow service, and the escrow service validates that the release builds. (And passes the bnudled test suite.) Rather surprisingly these services don't even cost that much... at least in the grand scheme of things. The requirement usually comes up only when the underlying supplier deal is at least six figures annually.
ß: well, contract law is still law but not in the sense the parent appears to be thinking
I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a second life. I’m already considering running old servers from e.g ETB but the cycles per watt on a phone are probably much better.