wouldn’t it have been easier to just read the source code? (not that GNU’s code is easy to read, but still)

It is

EDIT: I’m wrong, I don’t know what I was thinking, I misremembered hearing something apparently. Thank you for the corrections

Thank you! More people should do this. It may seem like $5 is nothing, but it’s actually great help. Even $1 helps out FOSS projects, as if even just 1% of the users of such projects donated $1 each month that’d be able to make a good income,

Pretty clear you either haven’t read the bill or grossly misunderstood it. What you describe is not proposed legislation - it’s the current reality that individuals and independent repair shops already live with.

The 2024 variant of the bill isn’t actually publicly available online, but here’s last year’s WIP text:

https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/SB542

Absolutely, the bill you mentioned is the one I was referring to. It does state that manufacturers must provide documentation, tools, and parts to both independent repairers and owners under fair terms. However, the real issue lies in how “fair and reasonable terms” are interpreted and applied in practice.

Here’s a quote from Google’s actual response:

User safety should be a top priority. Improper repair can be dangerous—especially if individuals use faulty parts or are unfamiliar with safety critical components, such as lithium ion batteries.** Legislation should acknowledge the risks borne by unskilled repairers and allow original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to provide parts assemblies rather than individual components to reduce the risk of injury.**

Doesn’t scream right to repair to me, let’s continue.

Right to Repair regulation should focus on: Devices that are repaired by an OEM’s existing repair offerings3 Right to Repair legislation in the United States is focused on leveling the playing field between OEM repair and independent repair offerings and putting consumers first, which we fully support

So, if they don’t repair their devices and only replace assemblies, they’re not required to do anything for RTR, how convenient!

Right to Repair regulation should focus on: Parts that are provided by an OEM’s existing repair operations

Hmm… So the easiest way to comply with the law is to not do anything

Policies should encourage repairers and recycling centers to recycle or to dispose of e-waste responsibly. We believe repair can be an important mechanism to reduce the large and growing problem of e-waste

Classic corporate green washing, this doesn’t mean recycling, it means break products, into as many parts as possible and dispose of them.

This is what recycling means to big tech:

Those are icloud locked iphone mainboards that have had their chips drilled through (this is "recycling). Some extremely smart people have figured out how to scrap them for parts, but that’s the ingenuity of actual repair people, not Big tech’s recycling.

Yes, it basically just reinforces the usual “Authorized Service Providers” spiel, i.e. it’s not a real right to repair bill.

Special Access for ASPs: manufacturers have to share repair manuals, tools, and parts ONLY with ASPs under “fair and reasonable terms”.

This means if you’re not part of their club and haven’t signed their agreements to become an ASP you may not be allowed to purchase parts. And to be clear, becoming an ASP can restrict you in the kinds of repairs you can provide, and the kinds of information you can tell your customers, under legal threat, and may require you to hit impossible sales quotas.

Parts and Conditions: It gets trickier with parts. Manufacturers aren’t actually forced to give you, the little guy, access to individual parts. What they’re obligated to do is to provide full assemblies to ASPs. So, if you need just a tiny part for a fix, tough luck – they can legally turn you away or make you buy a whole assembly, which is neither practical nor cost-effective.

Do you have a license for that?: It’s like asking, “Do you have a permit for that fishing rod?” before you even get to the lake. The bill implies that if you want to repair these devices, you better have some sort of certification or license. This could be a huge barrier for independent repair shops, especially those who don’t have the best relations with the company they repair devices of, or even DIY fixers. You want to repair something? First, prove that you’re qualified according to their standards, which can be pretty steep or even unrealistic for many. It’s another way of keeping the repair circle closed and controlled while pretending to be the moral authorities of social and environmental justice.

“Can’t you see just how great a company we are? We’re allowing you to repair YOUR device, (assuming that we like you, that is), aren’t we such good people? After all you’re our dear cust---------”

ERROR: CONSUMER ACCOUNT NR. 48570 TERMINATED FOR INAPPROVED WRONGSPEAK. PLEASE INSERT CREDIT CARD TO CONTINUE READING MESSAGE.

Thank you for buying from Google, we support you, we love 😍 right to repair, we love 💚 the environment and we 💕 you, dear consumer 😘… errr… customer

Exactly! This is just a PR stunt, nothing more, and it looks like “journalists” bought it.

except that’s not happening. It’s giving big tech good PR while they keep doing exactly what they have been doing for the past 2+ years (i.e. pretending to care about right to repair, and the environment, and whatever other good-soundign cause they can think of, without actually doing any of it)

No they will not.

That’s a shitty article by a “journalist” that hasn’t read the bill otherwise they would know that it’s NOT right to repair, but rather it’s a bill disguised as right to repair that actually gives even more monopolistic powers to big tech.

Their search results constantly impress me and honestly it’s 10 bucks for unlimited searches, it’s worth it even if it’s not a business expense, plus since you’re paying for the service they’re less likely to track you. I wish their code was FOSS, but I’ll take it, still better than google, bing, and all the others I’ve tried.

Also they actively promote the small web and you can even personalize your search results by removing websites you don’t like from the searches (for example I have a lot of big tech websites blocked)

Actually other search engines do much better with Lemmy. Kagi’s search works wonders if you select the filter for Fediverse Forums. And you can assign that filter to a bang, such as !lemmy, so that when you search “!lemmy query here” it’ll search only on the fediverse A few examples:

And this ladies and gentlemen is another reason why we should try to escape big tech’s grasp.

In general I agree with you. I find that most FOSS software is more polished than proprietary software, and it is generally more powerful.

However, I think that one problem that people somehow overlook in my opinion is that the financial side of the issue is also extremely important. I want more people to work on quality FOSS software, and I want it to become socially acceptable to work on FOSS as your main job. For that one thing is needed in my opinion: we as users of FOSS software need to give developers the financial incentives to work on what they love the whole time. In fact I want it to reach the point where immoral, non FOSS companies struggle to find developers because they’re all working on FOSS.

if you program the firmware directly your program can be stored, but it requires you to also buy the firmware writing tool and the FPGA unlocked version of the product (FPGA can be locked after writing it naturally)

what FOSS library do you maintain?

I’d like to correct you by saying that GPL is DEFINITELY enforceable in countries other than america. I can’t say about every country (tho that will be the case with every license), but for instance it’s definitely enforceable in europe. For example in Germany and France there have been a few lawsuits that the FSF helped carry out against immoral companies.

GPL Enforcement Cases - FSFE

If you’re in Germany the Institute for Legal Questions on Free and Open Source Software is a law firm that literally works only on enforcing the GPL, FOSS licenses and other technological human rights that are being ignored by big tech.

If you want to be even more sure about European Enforcement you may want to checkout the EUPL v1.2 which is GPLv3 compatible.

In other countries, such as Japan, the GPL is also enforceable, so long as you treat it the same way as copyright, so you’re willing to sue companies that you know are stealing from you (the FSF can help you if you can’t afford it).

Russia and China don’t care, but… it’s Russia and China, that’s not really news, is it? :)

EDIT: I will write a full article about the legal enforce-ability of FOSS licenses such as the GPL before the end of the year

MIT is a terrible license that only got popular because of the popularity of the anti-open source movement in the last decade.

one could write books about what’s wrong with the MIT license.

It could even theoretically be argued that MIT has in some ways allowed big tech companies to proliferate, by effectively allowing them to take open-source code, modify it, and then close it off in their proprietary software. What does this mean? It means that the work of countless dedicated open-source developers can be co-opted by companies that have done almost none of the work, reaping several billions of dollars, while the developers who actually did the work make no money. It’s like opening your doors wide only to have someone come in, take your stuff, and sell it back to you.

In contrast, in licenses like the GPL, there’s a requirement that if you use GPL-licensed code and modify it, your new code also has to be open-source under the GPL.

Quick aside, there won’t be a USB D (unless the USB people change their mind yet again), it will be something different from USB. The idea was to have USB A be what you plug on your source and B on your destination and was designed as a way to avoid power surges in the original 1.0 spec because the A side was physically different from the B side you weren’t ever going to plug in something that sends power to something that receives power (basically it prevented users from breaking their devices on accident). USB C changed that with a chip on each cable that handles negotiation before agreeing on a power spec

the syntax is more powerful than markdown, the whole idea of with blocks and the ability to have more complex layouts is great

I love it; it’s been my replacement for LaTeX ever since I’ve hears about it on hacker news

The concept of competition among tech companies has done a complete 180 on its original meaning. It’s no longer predominantly about crafting superior products; rather, it’s become a race to secure the largest amount of investor funding.

In this transformed landscape, the product itself and revenue generation often take a backseat, or at best, hold a tertiary importance. The heart of customer-centric ethos, especially crucial elements like data security, are now distressingly overlooked. What matters is getting the next investment to become the next “unicorn” and be acquired for billions of dollars. Silicon Valley Companies want the easy way out, do only a fraction of the work for an exponential amount of the benefits.

Don’t get me wrong, there are reasons to seek investment, getting a good product built is actually complex and you actually need a lot of different people working on it. The alternative is losing years of your life on a sisyphean ordeal of soul-crushing, hundred-hour work weeks (and that’s real work, not “let me check twitter” work), making you question your life choices and whether you should just throw it all away, abandon technology, become a hermit and move to a shed in the mountains.

The problem is that the EXPECTATION today is that you’re gonna build a third of a product, care about 1% of the actual business behind it and then pivoting exclusively to the pursuit of investment, letting everything else rot