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For years, companies profitably sold products with full schematics - even your appliances would come with them.

I applaud the work you're doing, but I hope the Framework team will find a way to close the gap on the pieces of public documentation still missing. This shows why it's important, and how there's a difference between open source and "almost open source".



That practice died after products were no longer manufactured domestically. At the time, it was relatively easy to go after someone who stole your IP. Now it's much more difficult.


This is a common argument against right to repair. It is worth noting that this only makes IP infringement a little more difficult. Reverse engineered schematics exist for many products.


As a noteworthy point in this discussion, Intel has the schematics for some 8xx series chipsets (Pentium III, early 4 era) reference designs still available on its own site:

https://download.intel.com/design/chipsets/designex/29835002...

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/design-guide/855gm-855...

They started becoming far more secretive after that.


> For years, companies profitably sold products with full schematics - even your appliances would come with them.

We should really go back to that. I still have the schematic of my Sony CRT lying in some drawer.


I do pvm repair from time to time and those manuals are a lifesaver. Recently spent a weekend away and traced all the traces on the 'g' board with a red pen to find the fault at a single bad 5v mosfet. If they still made crts I'd probably end up throwing the poor thing out or replacing the whole board. I reckon Sony isn't wringing their hands now wishing they'd withheld the manuals and instead sold the oem boards for 25 years after the model launched.


Reversing the schematics for those appliances would have been a laughably simple exercise for any competitor.




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