[HidyBush]

What is done is done. Even if some piece of legislation were to come out tomorrow all the older devices would still be completely closed off. Would we have to collectively just push to move to the new open-by-default devices or should we persist in reverse engineering the older stuff?

[rwmj]

That's not how laws work.

[HidyBush]

Are all laws retroactive? The EU has now mandated the use of USB-C, does that mean I can bring my iPhone 4 to Apple and have them solder the new port?

[rwmj]

Laws can say you cannot sell any more X unless it complies with Y. That's not a retroactive law.

[HidyBush]

I don't think you've read my reply correctly. If a law were to come out that said "you can't sell any more X unless it complies with Y" we would still have billions of devices that don't comply with Y. So even if a law about open hardware/firmware were to pass in the next few years, we would still need a huge reverse engineering effort to open up all the older devices. Unless you want to argue that, yes, we should forget about those older devices and all jump on the new compliant platform, I think pushing hard for good reverse engineers is a very implortant priority

[mschuster91]

> So even if a law about open hardware/firmware were to pass in the next few years, we would still need a huge reverse engineering effort to open up all the older devices.

Not necessarily. Impose a tax on all products where the manufacturers do not release all documentation even for past devices, that should serve as a pretty decent incentive.

Yes, legally it's a questionably grey area, but to be honest it's time to actually use our market power.

[marcosdumay]

Some laws are retroactive, some aren't. And, anyway, "you must publish the specs of any hardware that you keep selling" isn't retroactive in any way, but would solve most of the historic problem.

[black_puppydog]

Not all are, but they can be. There's typically a bias (can't remember the name, but it's a known concept) to not change the legality of past actions. But there have been and could be situations where previously-legal actions were retroactively outlawed and punished. It comes down to a decision per situation: what is a higher good: the individual's ability to rely on my current action to be legal in the future if it is legal now, or rather the ability of society to deter from things even though the laws haven't been updated yet. Prominent examples of this (sorry for the Godwin spin here) are punishments of Nazis post-war, for actions that were technically legal during the Nazi years. The argument being "being able to rely on the law not being applied retroactively is not a higher good that stopping people from doing clearly immoral things."

[HidyBush]

Nazi warcrimes were punished retroactively for a number or reasons, political and not. One of the most important ones was that what the Nazis did was blatanly wrong. You can't seriously claim that killing millions of people can be justified simply because there isn't a law about it, it's something so intrinsically evil that you can't rely on pure formality.

Arguably, refusing to publish literally every single document pertaining to proprietary hardware is not on the same level of obivous malpractice as a genocide, so I think you could have proposed a milder example to argue your point.

[black_puppydog]

Fair point, not sure why you're being downvoted...

I would never dream to equate proprietary documentation to Nazi war crimes. That's without question. I just used this because, like so often, in questions about these war crimes, there is no real argument to be made for "the other side" so it clearly shows the line of reasoning for breaking with a legal convention in specific cases. You said it yourself: "it's something so intrinsically evil that you can't rely on pure formality." Which is exactly the point. Protecting the perpetrator just because there's also a value in relying on their actions being legal at the time just doesn't outweigh the cost of letting them get away with such monstrosities.

A more recent and less evil example would actually be the Cum-Ex scandal. One question was whether money would have to be given back, given that what happened might be technically-legal but blatantly, and expressly against the spirit/intention of the law. But that whole thing is still being fought out so the conclusion is less clear cut.