On Thu, 30 Apr 2020 at 20:11, William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson@gmail.com> wrote:
Tried to get the FTC interested, no joy. Congress made noises about passing a law requiring software updates (especially for security issues), but still nothing on that either.
This is not practical or reasonable. Companies may not exist anymore and the wide market may not want to pay the premium that proper software requires. What might be more reasonable is regulation where you either continue providing needed software (local and cloud) to operate devices you sell or you provide all the source code for them, entirely your choice. Regulation would software in escrow and should company stop fulfilling its obligation, escrow would be opened to the public domain. This would create a new industry where some companies would specialise to continue developing software for long dead companies as well as of course open source versions. -- ++ytti