Right to Repair for Software?

> How would you implement a right to repair for software in 2023?

What has 2023 do to with anything? The four essential freedoms for software were written more than thirty years ago and today are more relevant than ever: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

To answer your question: any government mandated software, or software used, or bought, or promoted by, or paid for by the government should be free software.

Even fully open sources software can't be "repaired" when its dependencies break. There are a wide range of programs that broke when Python 2 went away.

As for the law, any software no longer for sale, or older than 10 years old should lose all copyright/IP protection, which ever happens first. Anyone should be able to write/support a Windows XP,7 or 8 clone at this point, along with Office, Exchange, etc. up to 2012

--- Warning --

Strong message (rant) to follow

Uppity programmers calling themselves software "engineers" act in almost totally the opposite manner of a true engineering discipline. They hold "legacy" in contempt, and break things in the name of "progress" or "safety" at odds with their stated goals. They ignore the lessons of history, and keep re-inventing the same things every decade or two.

You can still plug a BC-232 radio manufactured in the late 1940s into the wall and receive broadcast signals.

You're effectively prohibited from running a web browser or telephone from 10 years ago because of planned obsolesce. This needs to stop!

At the very least DRM and the DMCA shouldn't prevent people from creating and distributing their own fixes where they can. Patching/debugging/decompiling/modifying should be protected.

I love the idea of source code escrow as a requirement for copyright protection. If it were up to me, a DRM free copy of every work would need to be submitted to the copyright office for full copyright protection and that agency would publish and make available every work at copyright.gov automatically the moment the copyright on that work lapsed (ideally something that should happen in less than 10 years) while the works still protected would display a countdown clock showing the time until it's released to the public domain along with a list of reachable contacts for the copyright holders so people know who to contact if they don't want to wait.

If you're in the EU, you could use EU Directive 2009/24/EC. Someone with a better grasp of the law should check this, but you should be allowed to decompile & fix parts of the program which causes "interoperability" problems. It doesn't matter what EULA says or if it's copyrighted code.

EDIT: appartently there was a ruling in the Court of Justice of European Union on this

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f5b1193c-f423...

If I were dictator for a day, here's what I'd do:

1. Software would become entirely non-copyrightable

2. Software that infringes on a patent claim would be prima facie evidence of the claim's invalidity

3. Distributing any software in a way that would violate the AGPLv3 would be illegal (with the exception that if you had access to binaries but not the full corresponding source for a program prior to this change, you could still freely distribute everything you do have afterwards), and both upstream authors and downstream recipients would have standing to sue over it

This is an already solved problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpl

Abandonware should not be copyright-protected. The process of business dissolution should require sending a copy of all proprietary source-code to customers (assuming the business was not acquired / there is no new owner of the source code), and businesses that refuse to support legacy software with no upgrade path should be liable to provide the source code to such customers.

I don't think right-to-repair for commercially supported software makes sense. If you care about the right to modify and rebuild, put source access into the contract. But you have a commercial relationship, so the vendor is supposed to listen to your feature and bugfix requests. If they're unwilling to consider source access or feature/bugifx requests, don't buy from them, it sounds like they don't care about your business.

1. When a company goes out of business, stops selling older versions of their hardware/software for a period longer than 12 months, they should be required to release their source code under a FOSS license. "Use it or lose it".

2. Mandate release of software developed using public funds under AGPL (e.g. government portals) or GPL, with obvious exception carved out for defense projects

3. Mandate implementation of manual overrides that allow owners to flash unsigned firmware/software on their devices, similar to Android phones

4. Legalize and ban EULA prohibitions against reverse engineering

5. Legalize and ban EULA prohibitions against unauthorized changes, carve out exceptions where strictly necessary (e.g. medical equipment and equipment critical to public safety, online games?)

I think a start is in ensuring proper rights to browser extensions.

The Garmin Connect cookie banner was broken. It kept showing up on all reloads despite acceptance. In the end the add blocker fixed the problem by entirely removing the cookie banner.

I would say that is the first level of right to repair for software.

I currently have subscription payment fatigue. I'd really like a list of "One Time Payment" software. Are there app bundlers who resell subscriptions? Like if I just want to use an app only a couple of times?

I think it's less about copyright than the lack of nuance with copyright, in that copyright is given to whoever "owns" the right nit the creator(s), nor is there a way for the owner to automatically sell licenses and get royalties automatically.

Nir is there licenses for specific purposes, such as companies wanting to create their own franchise or a content creator wanting to use said copyright once in their work (even if you got permission you can be liable).

Nah, I wouldn't try that stuff. The paradigms are different.

You repair physical stuff because parts wear out. Software doesn't wear out.

In my opinion, it would be better to set a support window where a company must provide updates to fix flaws or security issues based on the type of device. OSes could be 5 years, safety recalls for vehicles are already covered. I'm not sure any action is really necessary on this.

Software is limited to IP. You can’t really compare hardware right to repair with software. If you use OS software then you can chop and change as you want as long as you merge back changes to the original code. I doubt however that companies like Microsoft would allow you to update the Operating System just because you don’t like the way something works.

I recently read a post where a company didn't release a 64-bit driver for their scanner.

This should absolutely be banned. Either release the source code, or build the code yourself.

There is no need to throw away a perfectly good scanner, which you can still get repaired, simply because the company prefers to sell you a new one.

How would that apply to SaaS, where everyone seems to be heading?