alt Hacker News>> In the event of a bankruptcy proceeding, all source code for a hardware product shall be open-sourced.
I'm guessing you've never run a company into bankruptcy (which I take as a good thing.)
Bankruptcy is when liabilities exceed assets and cash doesn't exist. At that point the assets are sold to raise money to give pennies on the dollar to creditors. The assets are not "binned", they are sold. That includes intangible assets like domains, source code, hardware schematics, and so on.
What you are proposing is akin to suggesting "any buildings should become public domain" or "any cars they own should go to a local charity".
In essence you are taking one asset class and dictating how that class is disposed of. Why that class? Why not all of them?
Thirdly (I thought of another reason) it's trivial to simply store this class of asset in a separate structure, that has no liabilities and hence can't be bankrupt. It becomes simply a different asset class. (Separating assets from liabilities is a common business practice - even if a company "owns" their office, it's typically a different company.)
I don't think you're crazy, it's a good area to explore, but it's not practical to implement this in the business landscape we currently exist in.
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The "simple" answer is to handle these issues long before bankruptcy, with right to repair laws. It is not actually simple of course.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to mandate software for hardware products be pluggable in such a way that you can modify the runtime with hooks.
During the commercial, supported life of the product the consumer doesn't know any different. But at EOL, repair shops can make a market for "modules" that can do things like change the remote server a IoT device talks to. Removes requirements for DRM, fixes bugs etc.
Threat to commercial interests is really low here in my view, an average consumer pays for a product and pays for the SaaS portion because its convenient and provides value. Then the product reaches EOL and the aftermarket takes over. No different to say the long, exhaustive use of used cars (at least in the decades prior to digital integration in cars, it remains to be seen how the next two decades go re:software services ridden cars.)
> I don't think you're crazy, it's a good area to explore, but it's not practical to implement this in the business landscape we currently exist in.
It's relatively straightforward. You put the code or whatever else your customers need into escrow with a third party. The code gets released if you discontinue the product or it otherwise leaves the market.
You then market that you're doing this, so that everyone A) knows they can pursue getting access to the escrowed stuff, B) it's a selling point to remove some of the vendor risk, and C) it's not just a capricious action to undermine creditor rights.
Of course, it may be harder to borrow money if you do this. And customers are generally not savvy enough to require this (though if you do a large enterprise deal, requiring code escrow is not an unknown term).
What would be the problem with making it a stipulation of the acquisition as a consumer protection law, regardless of the corporate structure? Either it goes to a buyer willing to take on the liability and continue operating it or wind it down cleanly in exchange for the IP (and bidders can price that liability in), or it goes to a government agency or NGO capable of open sourcing or extending its life.
I don’t know enough about how courts split up intangible assets like IP to suggest how to bundle it with this proposed liability, but I think it can be pushed up to insurance carriers like warranties are. Make the insurers liable so that they push the requirements downstream and make them first in line for the relevant IP as creditors. Allow them to argue in front of the bankruptcy court to define what bundle they are entitled to as creditors and them allow them to fire sale that bundle as part of the rest. If they can’t get enough to cover their calculations, they can dump it on the agency/NGO for free. (IANAL and I dont know what I’m talking about)
This is why the concept of "source code escrow" exists, as well as escrow in general.
The assets the usually goto a ip archive content heapvto slowly rot and ferment, in the hopes they cozld one dsy become a payday as prior art.So its not like they are useful beyond patent trolling.
Yeah so ultimately this means source code isn't considered an asset, but rather an integral part of a product that has been sold. This is how it should have been all along. It's the fundamental point of the free software movement. It's also how it was in the beginning, before companies like Microsoft realised they could use law and technical means to sell knowledge as a product. I hope one day we can go back to this and look back at this funny time when people made us think knowledge was a product.
This is why I really like the idea of establishing communism
> What you are proposing is akin to suggesting "any buildings should become public domain" or "any cars they own should go to a local charity".
I don't think this is accurate. I think they are proposing priority for the consumer in the hierarchy of creditors that is a little more specific about assets than the usual hierarchy.
All IP and licensing rights to IP could become specially encumbered during bankruptcy to enable a consumer priority on it, etc. I don't think it would be more difficult than some of the existing setup, but naturally much of the existing setup is more in theory than in practice.