Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "A Right to Repair compromise I'm not accepting and why" video.

  1. As a software engineer I think the only possible way forward is to make the required information available to all parties without limitations. If I were to decide, purchasing any hardware product would allow getting the schematics for free for that specific product. The information available in the schematics is already available to the owner of the hardware simply by scanning and probing the hardware so it's not like it's a trade secret and the manufacturer already has the data available in machine readable format because they were able to design and build the hardware so publishing it wouldn't cause extra cost to the manufacturer. Similarly, the firmware and all the required tools to flash the firmware should be freely available to hardware owners but the actual source code used to build the firmware could be kept secret as is usual with proprietary software. Again, the firmware can be extracted from the hardware so this wouldn't enforce manufacturers to disclose any secrets. In practice, it would be easier to publish the above mentioned data to public as whole instead of trying to publish it to hardware customers only. As for the spare parts, that's much harder part of the problem to enforce via legislation because of patents. Patents allow the patent owner to prevent the spare parts to be sold even if the spare parts could be manufactured by 3rd party suppliers. Maybe require that patented technology licensing must be included in the physical chips and specify in legislation that the 3rd party manufacturers are allowed to build copies of the chips as long as they pay the same amount of licensing fees as the OEM did? An alternative way would be to specify that licensing is tied to some specific part in the hardware (CPU, motherboard, case?) and replacing parts with spare parts do not require new license and 3rd party manufacturers are free to manufacture the spare parts without any license.
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  2.  @aprildolly6664  Partially yes, but you still lose all semantic information compared to original source code. Schematics reverse engineered by probing the hardware can show all details there's in the original design. Decompiling and reverse engineering software binary files can only reveal the interpretation of the compiler but you can never reveal the original source code (e.g. logical variable names, function names, comments) unless the distributor of the software leaves the debugging information intact (which is not normally done because it leaks details and increases file size of the executable files). Basically you can reverse engineer that memory block at 0x6234a512 is looped over by the counter value at 0x6321512 times, but you have to make lots of guesses to figure out what is the meaning of the contents of the memory at 0x6234a512 or what is the semantics of 0x6321512. Is it random number generator, license code checker or logo icon rendering code? Decompiling cannot tell the difference.
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