I’m generally curious what you all think about the “R2R” movement, because as a whole, it's great imo and Louis Rossmann, who’s the most recognizable face of it, is someone who I wish was more well known to the general public, but as a whole, what it aims to do is make it so that you're able to fix the things you purchase, rather than be “encouraged” by the company to purchase a new one, and in general, has become a question of “do you own your device/car/tractor/etc., or does the company” in terms of how much you're allowed to do with what you own.
People who farm have had to deal with John Deere locking down their tools so only licensed dealers can work on them effectively and have had to resort to jailbreaking their tractors on occasion, Apple and other Big Tech names have made their electronics harder to repair over the years, serializing and pairing parts to motherboards so they don't work even if you swap between two of the same part between two of the same brand new phone, it's a whole mess in and of itself, but the general conclusion that’s been agreed on is that only two things can really change this:
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Government regulations preventing all the nonsense like serialization/pairing, making manufacturers/OEMs have to provide parts and schematics.
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Society actually puts pressure on said companies by not buying those harder to repair products, which is pretty fucking hard, considering what society we live in, illustrated in this video.
Most R2R activists think that number 1 is way more likely to happen, and have been doing that, getting R2R laws passed in almost 20 states so far, but I'm just wondering if anyone has any issues with having to use the government to make companies less shitty when it comes to actually owning the device you purchase, or not.
On the one hand, companies take advantage of laws specifically designed to prevent third-party individuals and companies from being able to produce knock-offs of these electronic systems in a way that they can for other types of part. If a manufacturer adds some sort of copy protection mechanism then the DMCA makes it illegal for someone to reverse engineer it in a way that it isn't illegal for someone to make a third-party oil filter for example.
On the other hand, if you pass a law a big company is going to have its lawyers figure out the absolute bare minimum way to comply with the law. And the engineers the lawyers ask to help them with this task will do so enthusiastically because they're already overworked and have better things to do then update schematics, BOMs, and test software such that these things can be made public.
Make it so they have to provide parts for eg. a laptop and you're going to have to buy a replacement "electronics assembly, logic" which is the entire finished logic board. "No we can't just sell you this one power supply IC for you to solder on yourself, because we conformal coat the board; and if you remove the coating to replace the component it no longer conforms to specification and will be ineligible for warranty/no longer meets EMI|EMC|safety|emissions standards".
Doesn't matter if the BS excuse is true; that is the sort of thing they will do. And there are enough regulatory standards the products have to conform to that they can probably make it true on paper if they want to.
More likely is the Eastern Euros and Chinese will start getting more in the game of reverse engineering things like tractor ECUs and selling them on the gray/black market. They won't care about things like the DMCA, and their customers won't either.