Comment by nothrabannosir
5 months ago
By allowing them to benefit from the work of others who do. Directly or indirectly.
I’m not good at car maintenance but I would benefit from an environment where schematics are open and cars are easy to maintain by everyone: there would be more knowledge around it, more garages for me to choose from, etc.
Isn't the legal situation the opposite here? Car manufacturers don't release schematics because they believe in "free as in freedom". In fact any interfaces you as an end-user or an independent garage can use and schematics that are released such as the protocol for the diagnostic port, are open primarily because govermnents made laws saying so.
I'm most familiar with the "right to repair" situation with John Deere, which occasionally pops up on HN. The spirit of someone who releases something under GPL seems the opposite of that?
Yes I think we agree? I was even thinking specifically about John Deere but I’ve never bought a tractor so it seemed a gauche comparison :)
In context of your metaphor: what if we didn't need cars anymore?
Then we would stop checking them into our source control repositories.