> How do you feel about mandatory warranty periods?

You know what you're getting when you buy the product. It's critically important to be able to say "no warranty whatsoever"; Open Source wouldn't exist without that, and neither would the (still quite small) open hardware community. Nor, for that matter, would small hardware manufacturers.

(I do feel that you should always be legally allowed to try repairing something. That doesn't mean the manufacturer has to actively help you, or do work for you for free.)

No you don't.

For example, most consumer ice makers on the market in the UK has the same design flaw. I know because I learned in frustration to spot the signs. The design is clearly copied by multiple manufacturers. The problem is someone cut a few cents of their BOM by leaving out a sensor for when the water tray has rotated far enough, and instead just runs the motor 'long enough'.

Except most models on the market uses a plastic tray where doing that repeatedly eventually causes the tray to crack from the stress.

Most consumers buying those products won't know. It took my second one breaking and me taking apart both that one and my third one before I realised how the design is broken. Turns out even wildly different looking models still use the same basic mechanism.

In this case it's a trivially fixable machine once you know what the problem is if you have access to a spare tray. The exact same part would fit in many mods. Except they're not available for sale. So you junk 5-10kg of serviceable metal and plastic parts because of lack of a 100g part.

That may be fine for the manufacturers, but it's hugely detrimental to society that these products are being sold when most people have no way of telling upfront that they'll fail - it takes just long enough heavy use that most reviews don't reflect the problems.

> You know what you're getting when you buy the product.

No you don't. That's most of the point of warranties.

> Open Source

Sharing source code isn't a sale. If you do sell a program, open/closed source doesn't matter, and you don't need the ability to say "no warranty".

> open hardware community. Nor, for that matter, would small hardware manufacturers.

If you make more than a thousand of something, you have the resources to include a few diagrams and a simple but useful manual. For now I won't say anything about smaller quantities.

> If you make more than a thousand of something, you have the resources to include a few diagrams and a simple but useful manual. For now I won't say anything about smaller quantities.

If someone makes more than a thousand of something, they probably also have the resources to buy you a free lunch, too. But that's not the product you bought.

Sales are never just the product. At the very least there are rules about scams, basic safety, radio interference... Sometimes it's okay to have legal requirements that lead to fewer problems down the line. You might not think this particular rule is worth it, but it's not out of line with existing rules. And a lot of people do think it's worth it.

Whether a rule is "worth it" or not isn't the evaluation I'm making at all; the first question, before that, is "is there a critical life-or-death reason to interfere with a private transaction". There are plenty of features I'd like to have, and I look for people who sell products with those features. I often support people that specifically provide better documentation, open source software, diagrams, schematics, as well as companies that give back to the people and projects who make components they use. That's my choice, because I value those things. I'd certainly like other people to value those things as well.

Are you against all the existing rules that aren't life-or-death, then? Because they make life a much better place when you don't have to obsessively research every single product you buy.

And generally you can avoid it for bespoke items. It's not a barrier to personal deals.

I'm in favor of independent voluntary certifications (and testing labs, and similar) that encompass a large number of associated features and properties. I shop at places that have good return policies, and I like the resulting incentives to not sell products that will generate many returns. And I'm strongly in favor of having enough up-front information to know whether you're in a buyer-beware as-is situation or a "you don't need to check very carefully" situation, and make decisions accordingly.

I don't want to prohibit the equivalent of "This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY".

> And generally you can avoid it for bespoke items. It's not a barrier to personal deals.

I'm not just talking about bespoke or "personal deals", I'm also talking about "crowdfunded, we made 6,473 of them, but we're not a big company". Or "here are some schematics to build a piece of hardware, I'm not making any promises about the result". Or any number of other situations in which the choice is not "write and provide a repair manual or not", it's "develop the product or not".

> I'm in favor of independent voluntary certifications (and testing labs, and similar) that encompass a large number of associated features and properties.

Got any suggestions to make that actually happen? The benefit per sale is small enough that it's really hard to get the demand together on a per-product basis. Consumers don't have the time to learn every minor certification body either. But making the decision in bulk, as a society, is a lot more feasible.

Also, there isn't an infinite variety of products. The more dimensions you have to filter by, the worse your result gets per dollar. The free market can't solve everything at the same time.

> I don't want to prohibit the equivalent of "This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY".

That is again not a sale. And you can have triple your $0 back if it breaks.

> I'm also talking about "crowdfunded, we made 6,473 of them, but we're not a big company". Or "here are some schematics to build a piece of hardware, I'm not making any promises about the result". Or any number of other situations in which the choice is not "write and provide a repair manual or not", it's "develop the product or not".

A small crowdfunded operation can do this more easily than a big company. They can have a designer spend two days getting the final schematics together and writing a short document. It's such a miniscule cost that it will almost never be the difference between producing and not producing, and that tiny risk is worth the benefits.

And a schematic documents itself pretty well. But if you really don't want to make any promises then maybe don't charge money for the design.

> You know what you're getting when you buy the product.

To add to what others said on it: no, you don't. You would if the manufacturers provided full specs, data sheets and CAD drawings of the internals. They don't, for obvious reasons. What's worse, the whole point of a sales copy is to confuse you about what you're getting - providing disinformation, in form of vague promises of emotional effects and feature statements so broad you could drive an aircraft carrier through. A lot of consumer laws exist to counter this dynamic.

> Open Source wouldn't exist without that

It would, if the software was also free :). This is a longer topic, but there's an argument to be made that software industry is in its sorry state precisely because it's allowed to sell software "with no warranty whatsoever".

> To add to what others said on it: no, you don't. You would if the manufacturers provided full specs, data sheets and CAD drawings of the internals.

That's not what I'm referring to. I mean that you know when buying the product that there's no warranty.

First of all, all open source is free or you can build it yourself, so if the product does not work you did not wasted your money because you did not bought it, you signed no contract(I know you can pay for open source and for support).

>You know what you're getting when you buy the product This is not true, even today many people go in store, browse things and buy without going and read tons of reviews and complains about the product, do you think that the majority of people that buy a printer know the crap the manufactures do related to the cartridges(it is not printed on the box)? Companies would abuse their power to make more money, I remember when a law had to be passed here in Romania so that money exchanges would print the commission rates on big letters at minimum 10 centimeters because their were abusing people and no competition or educating people fixed it. better to fix the root cause then work around with free market ideology.