Why? You have the right to backport fixes yourself to your heart’s delight. Right to repair doesn’t require someone else to do the work for you for free.
> Right to repair doesn’t require someone else to do the work for you for free.
The term maybe not, but the proposed legislation totally does. Same as warranties or customer protection or not using toxic materials or ... ; none of that is "for free" to the manufacturer, but it is mandatory if you want to be allowed to sell your product.
But if legislation would actually require the Linux kernel, say, to have LTS for??? every major release? Every point release? It’s bad law and should absolutely not exist. If I’m running a community project I have a big FU for anyone trying to impose support requirements on me. Which was actually a rather hot topic at an open source conference I was just at in Europe.
Whatever you came up with in your mind sounds very weird and, yeah, obviously should not exist. That has nothing to do with the actual law though.
> I have a big FU for anyone trying to impose support requirements on me
Nobody talked about any of that?
Product: Samsung phone. Requirement: Samsung needs to keep that device usable for N years.
To meet that requirement Samsung will also need kernel updates. Whether that means doing them in house, paying someone else, making updates more seamless to easily upgrade or ... . The requirement to find a way to make that work is on Samsung, not you.
> Product: Samsung phone. Requirement: Samsung needs to keep that device usable for N years.
What does "usable" mean though?
If I were to go and dig my old Apple Centris 650 [1] that I bought around 1994 out of my pile of old electronics, if the hardware still actually works it would still be able to do everything it did back when it was my only computer. It is running A/UX [2], which is essentially Unix System V 2.2 with features from System V 3 and 3 and BSD 4.2 and 4.3 added.
Even much of what I currently do on Linux servers at work and on the command line at home with MacOS would work or be easy to port.
So in one sense it is usable, because it still does everything that it could do when I got it.
But it would not be very good for networking because even though it has ethernet and TCP/IP, it wouldn't have the right protocols to talk to most thing on today's internet and the browsers it has don't implement things that most websites now depend on.
So in another sense we could say it is not usable, although I think it would be more accurate to say it is no longer useful rather than unusable.
Exactly, but samsung does and they use the linux kernel. And this change affects them and is particularly untimely for them if laws require future long term support from them (not from linux). That was the comment you are replying to.
Of course, linux can just say "not my problem" -- the law does not affect them directly. The discussion topic is whether with this change in law companies like samsung will be willing to invest lots of money to get sufficiently long LTS versions and hence lead to a change in position on the linux side. ... or a switch to fuchsia.
So it’s for Samsung to decide if they want to take a different approach or not. And yeah it’s not a kernel.org problem and there’s actually likely no easy mechanism for Samsung to pay for LTS given the work is mostly done by a bunch of people working for many different companies. I think the Linux Foundation only pays the salaries of three maintainers—including Linus.
Device manufacturers can provide support for kernel used by their products themselves, pay some distro vendor to do it for them or contract maintainers directly. You expect Linux or Greg to do it for free because EU says so or what?
How? It's open source and Free Software, literally guaranteing the right to "repair" your code. Maybe I don't understand your question but it seems totally unrelated to the concept of an open source support cycle
