| The solution is simple: go back in time and get legislation passed to mandate the release of source code for devices that the original manufacturer no longer intends to support. That might be imposssible right now, and not just because of the time travel thing. While it's a good idea, and while people are working to get legislation passed that would prevent the forced obsolescence of products by companies requiring, then no longer supporting, public servers, for instance, companies would fight to the death any requirement to make their source available. But the problem isn't only theirs - open source projects that are steered by corporations often lack the willingness to expend some work now in order to save work decades from now. For instance, NetBSD moved to 64 bit time on all platforms using clever versioning to maintain compatibility with 32 bit timestamps. They did this on 32 bit architectures, too, back in 2012. [0], [1] Linux, on the other hand, has no shortage of people who either want to drop 32 bit support entirely or who think that the work to modernize 32 bit support isn't worthwhile (because, in part, they've forgotten that embedded Linux is a thing, and they also don't care about people who can't afford modern hardware). The 64 bit time transition for 32 bit platforms has taken ages, but is thankfully finally underway. [2] There's practically no hope for corporations. If they aren't given stuff that's already fixed (that is, if the fix isn't already baked in to the Linux they choose to use), they're certainly not going to "invest" resources in fixing things from the past. Heck - it took Google more than a week to fix issues with Chromecasts that came from bad planning. [3] What can we do? Most people aren't going to decide on a purchase based on whether their product might stop working in 2038 unless we make it very easy for them. We should test more things and point out when products will fail. Of course, nobody is going to care if their wifi device bought in 2025 won't run in 2038, but if someone told you that a $50,000 car's infotainment system will stop working, they might care. [0]: https://wiki.netbsd.org/symbol_versions/ [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200122035908/https://twitter.c... [2]: https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time [3]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/google_chromecast_fix... |