Hopefully one day companies like Apple will be forced to disclose documentation to the devices they sell so that consumers can make the full use of them and won't have to waste time on reverse engineering.
that would put a lot of obligation on the vendor to honor some kind of contract they don't need to do today. They can change anything they want with zero cost today.
Does documentation necessarily create such an obligation? That would jeopardize most open-source projects, most of which explicitly promise no warranty.
The big issue with this is apple does not own all of the IP in a any of their hardware, much of it is a mixture of licenses from many vendors some of it owned by apple much of it just licensed.
Apples licenses for these will include very strict NDA clauses that make it impossible for apple to share the documentation they are provided but that vendor.
As long as they are "your" speakers. Subscription sounds like you're renting speakers. I know that's probably a facetious/pedantic point but it strikes to the heart of the fact that we should be calling for more accurate description of the relationship between a consumer and the hardware they acquire i.e. calling a spade a spade. You're not buying a laptop, or an M1 CPU in a metal case. You're buying a magic Apple service delivery box that happens to permit certain other uses. Customer expectations should match description should match function.
I say this as a longstanding iPhone user, and up until recently, Mac user.
Not a legal obligation but a support obligation. Documenting implies stability of an API. It says, use this thing we intend for you to use. Usually, you mark an API as deprecated, and often provide an alternative, before removing it.
Sometimes backwards compatibility is preserved even to the point of preserving bugs (especially if the companies/apps depending on it are large):
This is what Intel/AMD have done for multiple generations of their GPU hardware now for a decade or more. Hasn't stopped them from innovating. Nvidia has PTX with a proprietary steam assembler underneath which can retarget any hardware changes. Either way, Apple can offer more documentation than it currently does.
> that would put a lot of obligation on the vendor to honor some kind of contract they don't need to do today. They can change anything they want with zero cost today.
So why can't we just allow them to keep making those changes, but still have to document them? I'm sure they document them internally anyway.
Except it won't - companies which are fully open source won't have any additional costs, and their products can be priced the same as normal.
It's only companies who have fully closed tech will have to pay the tax, and really that tax is compensating the rest of the country for the work and knowledge that company wants to keep secret.
No, this applies only to APIs, which are documented as such. The users of such APIs might have a certain expectation of long-term support. This is talking about documentation of the device which is sold, the software equivalent of providing schematics to eletrical devices. Which for a long time was quite common. You could buy stereo amplifiers with complete schematics. They don't create an obligation that future products have the same schematics, their purpose is solely for the repair of the device sold.
Then you'll probably get a link to a zip on the very bottom of the "legal >> open source" section of their website with badly auto-generated API docs without any comments or context, knowing big closed-source software orgs.
Right to repair. Hasn't happened because it's not a right yet.
Alternatively maybe anti trust, since using your monopoly on hardware to get a monopoly on software which is the essence of anti trust anyways. Hasn't happened because anti trust enforcement is really weak. Probably also doesn't force documentation.
Alternatively copyright and patent misuse, which is using your government granted monopoly on creating the exact hardware (copyright), or some of the features in the hardware (patents) to get a monopoly in an adjacent area (running software on that hardware) voiding the copyrights and patents. Hasn't happened because while the law exists (in common law) the courts apply it very conservatively. Also probably doesn't get documentation, just the right to run things on it.
Alternatively an interpretation of the quid quo pro of intellectual property (i.e. you disclose something in exchange for a temporary monopoly) being interpreted more strongly, such that you have to disclose the details of the internals to get intellectual property rights. Hasn't happened yet because today the quid quo pro isn't interpreted that strongly.
The interactions between a silicon chip and software drivers has nothing to do with right to repair. Never has been.
> Alternatively maybe anti trust, since using your monopoly on hardware to get a monopoly on software
Apple doesn't have a monopoly on any hardware, except insofar as any company has a natural monopoly on their own products, as made explicitly legal by copyright and patent laws.
Furthermore, one has to remember that there's a world outside of commodity PC hardware. The notion of hardware and software being separate is the rare exception, not the rule. Other than commodity PC computer hardware, nearly every product sold is both software and hardware bundled as a unit, with no marketplace expectation of end users replacing the software with an alternative. Whether you're talking about a car, washing machine, television, digital camera, microwave oven, garage door opener, CD player, indoor-outdoor thermometer, label printer, or an air conditioner, the software that comes with it is seen as part of the product.
In fact, this is even true for many computer components—companies like Nvidia aren't being any more helpful about their GPUs as Apple is with theirs.
Apple's computers straddle an interesting boundary between consumer devices and commodity PCs. But make no mistake, Apple isn't obligated to do anything here. You're not entitled to something because you want it.
> using your government granted monopoly on creating the exact hardware (copyright), or some of the features in the hardware (patents) to get a monopoly in an adjacent area (running software on that hardware)
Obviously legal. See above.
> Alternatively an interpretation of the quid quo pro of intellectual property
> The interactions between a silicon chip and software drivers has nothing to do with right to repair. Never has been.
Well, that's perhaps because that interaction's importance for the functioning of ubuquitous things in life is a relatively recent thing. I don't understand why there's supposed to be some fundamental reason why we can't change our laws to encompass also the right to repair software, or to the right to repair the interactions between hardware and software. Sure, these things aren't rights today – but who's to say we can't make it so?
I didn’t say that new rights couldn’t be established in the future, only that Right to Repair does not now and has not in the past ever claimed to encompass a right to the source code of proprietary commercial software.
> The interactions between a silicon chip and software drivers has nothing to do with right to repair. Never has been.
Software bugs... you could reasonably end up with a right to fix them given the current direction of right to repair lobbying. And that right might include the right to documentation.
> Apple doesn't have a monopoly on any hardware, except insofar as any company has a natural monopoly on their own products, as made explicitly legal by copyright and patent laws.
Which is to say they have a monopoly...
Anti trust never makes having a monopoly illegal, it makes exploiting that monopoly to gain further monopolies illegal. It doesn't care about where the monopoly came from.
It does care about the kind of monopoly, current anti trust rules probably don't consider the monopoly Apple has from copyright and patents on hardware to be of the right category (to cover an entire market)... but that could easily change.
If apple were found to be in violation of Patent misuses the result would not be that apple is forced to open up the internals of how their products work but rather that patens apple has would be make null and void and others could copy them (based on the already public patent filling and nothing more).
Indeed, but if the doctrine started becoming more widely applied I imagine that they would start actively trying to avoid having it apply to them, e.g. by not using their hardware monopolies (patents) in ways that create software monopolies.
Sure, but by that definition every commercial product constructed from multiple parts has a monopoly over all their components. Starbucks has a “monopoly” over what coffee is sold within Starbucks cups. Sorry, but I just can’t take that kind of argument seriously.
> current anti trust rules probably don't consider the monopoly Apple has from copyright and patents on hardware to be of the right category (to cover an entire market)... but that could easily change.
Copyright and patents are the very definition of a legal monopoly. I don't think you're being serious.
> Sure, but by that definition every commercial product constructed from multiple parts has a monopoly over all their components. Starbucks has a “monopoly” over what coffee is sold within Starbucks cups. Sorry, but I just can’t take that kind of argument seriously.
You're right, my reply there was poorly worded, fortunately you seem to agree with the point of the reply anyways since you say
> Copyright and patents are the very definition of a legal monopoly.
Which really is just the point.
However I am being entirely serious that there is more that not all monopolies implicate current anti trust law. Whether or not they do depends on whether or not they're a monopoly over the entirety of a market, not over a certain invention (patent) or copying a certain work of art (copyright).
You can see that at play in the current Epic v Apple case for instance. It's unambiguous that Apple has a monopoly over distributing apps to iPhones, it is ambiguous over whether the relevant market here is iPhone users, and therefore whether or not anti trust law applies.
Until the early 90s probably you could get documentation for every device sold - schematics, calibration procedures, BOMs, technical drawings and so on. That ended when companies from countries with less strict IP laws started copying the products that sell. Governments didn't do much to protect businesses and such secrecy is now the effect of this.
Or to put it less insolently: I've learned my craft by reverse engineering; as a auto-didactic tool it's a primary learning tool, definitely beats reading the manual.
