this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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Maybe what we need to do is to start considering such feature abandonment as abandonware and make it so all abandonware must be user modifiable and open source. (To me ideally, there would be a complete separation between software and hardware, aka, if the company can substitute or replace it, so must the user)
I'm pretty sure that looks better on paper than it will do in the real world. Today a lot of software libraries are incorporated into applications. These libraries solve specific problems that the vendor didn't have to solve themselves. Often these libraries are licensed to be used under specific circumstances. Even if you would get your hands on the source code, you are certainly not allowed to declare it open source.
So even if Sony were to release the OS on the Bravia as open source, it would most likely be a Swiss cheese with holes that had to be fixed before it was usable.
At that point you still wouldn't have gained much from an end user perspective since there is still no app store. Even if you set up your own local app store you would have to convince Netflix and other streaming services to release a client app for your tv.
I think the solution is more in the direction of legal pressure. If you sell something, it should be expected that you honor that sale and not change it to something it wasn't when you happily accepted the money.
The point in my “ideal world” is that because they are forced to open source the software and allow users to replace it, other users could for example try to implement android TV on that old Sony Bravia tv. If the Android phone market is anytbing to go by, it is a real possibility, depending on the popularity of the tv
Might be your ideal world but that will not happen. The only reason Android is "open" is because Google wanted to hit Microsoft and Apple where it hurts. If they were super pro open source they would have released all code for Okay Services and the hardware in Nexus and Pixel.
But they didn't... So... Yeah... Not even Google is sharing your vision.