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by smif 1024 days ago
How would opening up the hardware solve the issue for the average consumer? Let's say the official update channel goes dead on your smart fridge, the company has gone out of business. What would happen in that scenario for the average consumer (not someone who posesses the skills or will to tinker around with the firmware and such)?
1 comments
kxrm 1024 days ago
My comment is more about not incentivizing locking down hardware vs incentivizing opening it up so I can't speak a lot to your questions.

> How would opening up the hardware solve the issue for the average consumer?

At the risk of going off-topic, what I will ask you is, why do you feel that opening hardware requires a consumer have special skills? I'd argue that open hardware wouldn't have to limit adoption to those who possess the skills. I think requiring special skills is a bug because currently manufacturers don't even consider the idea of a second life for products.

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smif 1024 days ago
I'm not saying that hardware shouldn't be open in some form or another (at least in a way that doesn't stifle innovation, maybe also taking another look at how the patent system works and such).

I guess I'm just having trouble visualizing how this problem gets solved for the average joe consumer in a world where hypothetically the hardware is open. Who pushes the security patches out to the devices? All of that has a cost in terms of bandwidth, maintenance, etc. If it's a community effort, what happens when the device gets old enough where no one is really working on it anymore, no more community updates, people have moved on, etc. How does liability work in a world with community-driven updates? What happens if a buggy community update is pushed and the smart fridge malfunctions and causes a flood / damages? What about supply-chain attacks and such?

I guess for the code-literate subset of consumers, they can just go to the github repo and see exactly what is changing and where, but for the non-code-literate consumers, how do they know what kind of updates they are getting from the community?

What about a middle-ground option? Where towards the end-of-life for the product, you are asked a question if you want to switch to a different update channel than the manufacturer default, and if there is no response recorded after X amount of days or whatever, the device just bricks itself?

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