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Comment by supportlocal4h | Hacker News Reader

This again? The solution is almost never legislation.

If just 20% of prospective buyers devoted 1/2 their budgets to a common open solution, they could break out. If there were a tiny company offering an old school model with modern features at a competitive price, that would be enough. Then, if farmers choose to lock themselves in, it would be a real choice and their own fault.

BSD didn't need legislation. GNU didn't. Windows still thrives, but people have a choice. Just convince ADM and a few others to throw some pennies at a startup. Except that the new licensing greatly benefits those giants. So you'd have to convince 100s of little guys to throw big money your way.

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> BSD didn't need legislation. GNU didn't.

They absolutely did. Both depend on copyright. GNU licenses in particular were created in reaction to copyright protection being extended to computer programs as if they were literary works. Today, all of free and open source software directly depends on copyright in order to even be recognized as such.

This is very biased for the giant companies, you have laws to protect companies with copyright and anti hacking laws but when is time for protecting the normal people we can't modify or add a new law. I would be fine with no protection law but then I should be able to crack, pirate and reverse engineer software and hardware.

BSD didn’t need legislation but it did need a long legal process to resolve in its favor.

I think there's even a theory that one of the reasons BSD is a small niche OS and Linux powers the world is because BSD was tied up in litigation for a while.

I don't know if it's a theory as so much as it actually happened. I remember the SCO lawsuits and it scared a lot of people away from BSD, the user base was a decent portion on free *nix at the time and it was virtually overnight Linux became the uncontested dominate force when that happened. SCO had a huge chilling effect on BSD which was it's intention all along.

Unless you have proof (not just evidence) it remains q theory.

If just 20% of prospective buyers devoted half their budgets, 20% more farmers and construction companies would be out of business.

Right to Repair legislation goes 90% of the way to stopping the lockdown of the machine internals and codifies for everyone that once a machine is sold and in use, the manufacturer no longer has control over that machine.

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