First some thoughts about your specific example: My impression (although, just from working in something very tenuously related to automotive stuff) is that the real time, safety critical stuff, and the entertainment center stuff, are on two unrelated computers, ideally with very little connection between them.
The safety critical stuff really ought to be supported for the lifetime of the car. But it shouldn’t have internet access anyway, so a big source of attacks is not available. They sometimes update that software when you go in for maintenance, right? It seems fine.
The entertainment center, why shouldn’t we be able to install our own OS on it? Those things are always quite buggy anyway, I’d love to install Linux on mine.
—
More generally:
Yes, I’ll admit I was going for a bit of back door trickiness. I do think it would be hard to just open up a lot of current platforms.
If the law is that manufacturers must either release “everything” (hand-wave-ily) or offer a full refund in order to release their support obligation, then I’d expect them to do one of the following:
* Make new designs that are easier to open up. A win for everybody! They can push back on the license terms for the libraries they use. Or, perhaps some mechanism could be designed so that they open up the rest of their platform, and the library developer that doesn’t want to open up can keep their part of the support obligation.
* Extend the support lifetime to the point where they are happy to just offer refunds to the few remaining users.
As you say,
> And expecting/dictating a reasonable lifetime from a product might be the better choice - and as the EU directive regarding user-replacable smartphone batteries shows, this goes beyond software.
But I think a reasonable lifespan depends on the type of device, locking in a specific number with the law seems difficult. Offering a choice instead would let the lifetime be set dynamically, but without the current odd situation where obligations just evaporate into nothingness.
The safety critical stuff really ought to be supported for the lifetime of the car. But it shouldn’t have internet access anyway, so a big source of attacks is not available. They sometimes update that software when you go in for maintenance, right? It seems fine.
The entertainment center, why shouldn’t we be able to install our own OS on it? Those things are always quite buggy anyway, I’d love to install Linux on mine.
—
More generally:
Yes, I’ll admit I was going for a bit of back door trickiness. I do think it would be hard to just open up a lot of current platforms.
If the law is that manufacturers must either release “everything” (hand-wave-ily) or offer a full refund in order to release their support obligation, then I’d expect them to do one of the following:
* Make new designs that are easier to open up. A win for everybody! They can push back on the license terms for the libraries they use. Or, perhaps some mechanism could be designed so that they open up the rest of their platform, and the library developer that doesn’t want to open up can keep their part of the support obligation.
* Extend the support lifetime to the point where they are happy to just offer refunds to the few remaining users.
As you say,
> And expecting/dictating a reasonable lifetime from a product might be the better choice - and as the EU directive regarding user-replacable smartphone batteries shows, this goes beyond software.
But I think a reasonable lifespan depends on the type of device, locking in a specific number with the law seems difficult. Offering a choice instead would let the lifetime be set dynamically, but without the current odd situation where obligations just evaporate into nothingness.