[laurent92]

Same as patent law — After 20 years, no protection? Except the cycle is rather 5 years.

As a startup, I’m ok. But customers will be hit by vulns every year, either with the OS or any layer up to my software, and one of them will have to be upgraded.

[watt]

Stronger than that. When releasing the gadget, require that the firmware source build tree is put in escrow. After 5 years it is opened to enable ongoing maintenance.

The initial release of gadget is released with firmware build by the escrow build process. This will ensure the company actually provides tree that builds the real thing.

[laurent92]

Good idea, better than classic escrow: With a classic escrow, your customers are incentivized to make you go bankrupt, so that they recover the source code and eat your benefits.

But that doesn’t solve the vulnerabilities and the need to have 0-day updates.