Comment by AtlasBarfed
1 day ago
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?
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
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.
So if I have software on my website and you pay for it and you’re in some European country that has this law then you (who?) can sue me for not uploading all my builds to what? some s3 endpoint?
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