Comment by ashdksnndck
13 hours ago
Why is this sad? I’m having a hard time understanding the thought you are communicating. It seems cool that a CTO had fun and that motivated him to enable ADB for everyone?
13 hours ago
Why is this sad? I’m having a hard time understanding the thought you are communicating. It seems cool that a CTO had fun and that motivated him to enable ADB for everyone?
Just that the default reality is the hardware you buy belonging to someone else, who only really sold you a license to use the hardware on limited terms until the manufacturer drops support
This generalizes to “good news is bad news because things must be bad by default for good things to be news”
as other has said, it is sad that it took that a CTO had fun to open it up, and not the rest of the public discourse about things like this.
I'm happy he had fun and all for him making decisions based on it. But it shouldn't have taken this.
Why didn’t it occur to someone that this would be fun to do within the CTO having to realize this
Why didn't it occur to someone without occurring to someone first?
People within Meta have been campaigning for this for _years_; even people as high up as John Carmack were pushing for open bootloaders on deprecated hardware (and he achieved that on the Go headset, but not as a general policy)
Because the idea that something this obvious occurred to the CTO first is very, very unlikely. What is more probable was that leadership ignored people who disagreed until the CTO convinced himself it was a good idea and went ahead with it.
Because it could’ve just as easily never happened despite how simple of a feature it is to enable. That happens all the time. Tons of “useless” tech out there that can be made useful with 5min of effort but the incentives aren’t there, so they end up in landfills.
The default position should be trying to make devices useful as long as possible, even if they want to qualify it with “so long as it’s sufficiently reasonable to do so.”
It shouldn’t be left to the whim of a C-suite denizen.
If the leadership of a company aren't the right people to make decisions about what that company does, who is?
Are you advocating for legislation? How would that work?
Ideally the workers. But failing that, legislation would probably be a good thing to at least try to reduce e-waste from closed, discarded devices. Like, if a device line is at its end of line from the company, then they might as well make it open for the community. They're not supporting it anymore, after all, but someone might want to.
Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.
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