How about enacting a law that you either need to keep your hardware running via software updates, or you need to open-source all the software for others to keep doing so the moment you cease support. Would prevent a lot of waste.
Right, people don’t want to manually patch their speakers, but people probably don’t want to throw them out after a few years either.
In any case, presumably in this proposed scenario secondary service industries would pop up to do this for them/offer ongoing alternatives. Much like computer maintenance and repair.
Open source doesn't need to be more complicated. There are several open source projects with majority of users with only consumer mindset. VLC comes to mind.
The original producers of the software could be unhelpful even if they comply though. That's another story.
I know we're a long way off, but a device should not require constant software updates to keep working. I think that just highlights the relative immaturity of the software industry.
There is no easy way to do this because a lot of proprietary software uses components that are licensed from other companies. So they are not in a position to open-source their entire code base because they don't actually own all of it.
I think this is one example among many similar that needs to happen. Though there's tremendous inertia for ideas like this. The people who needs to understand or care probably doesn't.
