I would love to see regulation that required making bootloaders unlockable to enable this sort of thing. People have been making clusters of consumer hardware for decades: I’m sure people remember the PS3 supercomputers of the mid 2000s.
I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a second life. I’m already considering running old servers from e.g ETB but the cycles per watt on a phone are probably much better.
Isn't the story that some gaming consoles were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales? I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked
Yet I 100% agree on a generic computing device and they're not really that different in the end. Maybe that it needs to be unlockable after it has been on the market for 4 years or so (all units, no matter when they were sold, no matter if support ended)
Or maybe undercutting the competition like this to make it back later on games is not a profit model we should want? And that everything should just be unlockable insofar as it has X amount of memory, CPU power, capable of doing IP traffic... something like that. (Seems silly to require a firmware unlock on your toaster)
> I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked
Sure it’s fair, and manufacturers could price accordingly. Legally enforceable is another story.
> were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales?
To be honest that has always had a smell to me akin to dumping.
Differences between dumping and "loss leader"?
Consoles haven't been sold with a loss for generations, please stop repeating that to support DRM.
Make it a seven year rule: hardware vendors must release necessary source code for firmware, blobs, etc.
I think there should be a 20 year rule for all released commercial software to release the source code outside of national security concerns.
Seems like you may be interested in this petition: https://publiccode.eu
lol or what? How do you make people do a thing, anything, 20 years later?
Code escrow.
You factor in the expense of having your code releases escrowed by a third party (where part of the escrow contract itself is: "must be buildable from sources as provided"), and have a post-release pipeline that automatically uploads the new version. At the end of the term, the escrow holder releases all the versions.
This is a fairly common arrangement in high finance. If you want to supply services to a bank/insurer/etc. they will typically require an escrow arrangement as a contingency plan against you as a vendor going away. And yes, they pay the escrow costs.
There are countries that require published material to be submitted to a national archive[0]. A similar system could be done for software source code and made public on expiry.
[0] https://youtu.be/ZNVuIU6UUiM