They you should support all devices running free software (whenever they exist of course), because such software ensures a possibility of a repair.

No they don't. It's crack smoking pipe dream and I wish people would stop promoting it as viable. Firstly it absolves the manufacturer or their support obligations - "look it's OSS, fuck off!".

On top of that I've dealt with some nightmare OSS software before. Getting anything to build is a nightmare on some products even if you know how to fix the issue, which you might not. Also what is the time worth to fix something? If we're talking hours of work for a simple problem, which is likely, then it doesn't make sense.

It goes in the trash.

What we need is legislation that forces the vendor to look after the hardware and software and environmental impact of their products for a reasonable externally specified lifespan. If they screw up, they should buy it back for a portion of the value. 2Y old android handset been abandoned by the vendor? Mandatory payment of 4 years worth of missing service back to the purchasers. Stuff will start lasting a long time them. That solves the environmental, support and repair issues in one go.

Nothing is perfect, and OSS certainly isn't an exception to that. But, personally, I've had much more trouble and strife on the whole with proprietary software than OSS.

I think it’s long past time for OSS supporters to at least acknowledge the fact that, to adapt a common phrase:

Commercial software can travel half way around the world while the Open Source version is putting on its shoes.

Open source is slow, and it’s simply not feasible to live a life where everything is 100% tech freedom without making enormous sacrifices. For example the only way to avoid software in cars would be to drive something 20+ years old, which just isn’t realistic for (mostly) everyone.

The incentives for companies are so strong that in most cases you don’t even have an option, as every available product has the same type of lockdown.

If you want a car without software you have to go back to the 1970s. By 1984 almost everything was fuel injected (and the last hold outs had very complex computers controlling the carburetor). there are open source fuel injection computers, but they are very limited as to what they support and often when you look close don't look very open.

I’d be very surprised if 90% of OSS supporters don’t already believe this.

Repair also serves companies better in the long run because one of the big results is that it ends up training the next generation of builders. If you talk to engineers it's pretty common to hear about how they loved to take things apart as a kid and learn how things worked. You don't get the equivalent of a child restoring a classic car or fixing the plumbing with their parent with software. Not to mention that companies themselves will get bug fixes or upgrades from the community who are doing things with the product that the creator never thought of.

Not having the software open and right to repair just seems to me like a classic benefit in the short term, detriment in the long run. And like you say, worse for the public at any timescale. I do want to protect developers, but I think we can do this in a way that doesn't produce so much fucking junk.

> Repair also serves companies better in the long run because one of the big results is that it ends up training the next generation of builders.

While I totally agree, this benefit is impossible to quantify on a quarterly report, so I expect it will not move decision makers. That's not to mention that MBOs and not engineers run many modern companies so their conception of engineers is "that cost centre I want to minimize", not a resource that needs to be nurtured.

> this benefit is impossible to quantify on a quarterly report

Well I think this is a more precise version of the short term long term dichotomy I expressed. So much of our world is dictated by quarterly reports and it's incredibly destructive. Isn't one of the key things that makes humans unique is our ability to do future planning? I guess quarterly is more than most animals, but it still seems incredibly short sighted considering we learned to prep for winter millennia ago.

The concept of limited liability is the source of many of America's societal ills.

If people were liable forever for the actions and could not contract it away, especially when concerning actions that can harm the public, you would see executives and boards of directors behave very differently do today.

Limited by ability socializes risk and harms and prioritizes profits. They both should be privatized.

You could say that it serves the industry better in the long run, however, for each specific company arguably it's not a benefit - there's no competitive advantage if the same new builders are available to their competitors, and they already have some builders and capacity for making more, so if it's more difficult for new ones, well, that's just a higher barrier for entry that allows them to extract higher margins; having higher costs doesn't necessarily mean lower profits if you can just raise prices as no potential competitors have lower costs.

I'm not sure this is true. Meta seems to be doing pretty well with everyone hacking on LLaMA. Same with Stability and Stable Diffusion. Plus there's the whole set of jobs that are not software based, where they are naturally "open source".