this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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Actually, in the long run this might be something good. This will force EU lawmakers to act regarding software services being pulled without consent.
A lot of things are sold with features relying on software services / cloud services. You buy a smart tv today and two years later the vendor decides to kill the appstore. (Had a friend who bought a Sony Bravia TV. Two years after she bought it she finally got a network outlet installed near the tv. However, Sony had decided to go another route and just killed 99% of all apps and the smart TV was really dumb)
Is this what you initially paid for when you decided to buy the device? Should the consumer just accept that a major part of the listed features just disappears?
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.
A good start would be to require that companies put an expiration date on the products they sell, and until that date they are legally required to support the product. Also, it should be put into law that companies cannot remove features, services or content in a product after it was already sold until the expiration date.