Re:Nest Reminds Customers That Ownership Isn't What It Used ...
by cookiecaper on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @12:28AM
(#11436611)
>What you can't get today and that you could never, ever get before either, is the guarantee that the company you bought that device from will keep its servers alive for any given period of time.
The thing that's different now is that in the old days, the days when it wasn't possible for devices to phone home, they operated independently and contained the functionality offered within themselves. There were no servers to worry about.
It didn't matter if the manufacturer closed a business unit, discontinued the product, or anything else; the functionality you paid for at the time of purchase was contained within the component itself. These days, the functionality is contained in code running on someone else's servers, which may be shut down, disabled, or non-functional at any time.
Potential solutions to this:
a) educate consumers so that it's obvious when they're buying a device whose primary functions are not self-contained, and so that they don't buy these.
b) make some legal requirement that the systems running the primary functionality are online and accessible for at least X time after the last unit is sold, or the code can be loaded onto and executed upon the device in a self-contained manner if the primary functional system goes offline, or similar.
c) allow people to reverse engineer the hardware, make alternate firmwares that perform the promised functions within the device itself, require the primary functional service code be stored in escrow in case of shutdown, and, if shut down, then the copyright is automatically invalidated and the code automatically released, so that it can be run and/or modified by any interested party. Legal structures would have to be installed to protect people who do this.
The thing that's different now is that in the old days, the days when it wasn't possible for devices to phone home, they operated independently and contained the functionality offered within themselves. There were no servers to worry about.
It didn't matter if the manufacturer closed a business unit, discontinued the product, or anything else; the functionality you paid for at the time of purchase was contained within the component itself. These days, the functionality is contained in code running on someone else's servers, which may be shut down, disabled, or non-functional at any time.
Potential solutions to this:
a) educate consumers so that it's obvious when they're buying a device whose primary functions are not self-contained, and so that they don't buy these.
b) make some legal requirement that the systems running the primary functionality are online and accessible for at least X time after the last unit is sold, or the code can be loaded onto and executed upon the device in a self-contained manner if the primary functional system goes offline, or similar.
c) allow people to reverse engineer the hardware, make alternate firmwares that perform the promised functions within the device itself, require the primary functional service code be stored in escrow in case of shutdown, and, if shut down, then the copyright is automatically invalidated and the code automatically released, so that it can be run and/or modified by any interested party. Legal structures would have to be installed to protect people who do this.