Enforcing Sustainable Support Laws for Smartphones: Right to Repair and GPL Enforcement

This should actually be enforced by law: a decent minimum period of support.

In the context of ‘right to repair’, I would prefer to see legislation that obliges smartphone manufacturers to open the bootloader after the support period, combined with mandatory publication of source code of binary blobs that are kernel version dependent and GPL enforcement.

PC manufacturers don’t provide PC-specific support for as long as many smartphone manufacturers provide for smartphones, nor do they need to. This is due to a better separation between drivers/binary blobs and OS version. A PC that is +10 years old still runs the latest Linux version just fine, even though binary blobs can be used (for example for the wireless adapter). Why does this work for PCs and not for smartphones?

It is time that smartphones are also made suitable for sustainable general-purpose computing, and to ban constructions that perpetuate planned obsolescence.

[Reactie gewijzigd door The Zep Man op 9 november 2023 06:58]

2023-11-08 20:41:00
#Samsung #stop #regular #updates #Galaxy #Fold #years