Comment by jonhohle
15 hours ago
That’s why I said, at what level should this disclosure be required? Obviously a small open source utility shouldn’t have to document everything. What about a $20 electric screwdriver with an unpopulated JTAG header? a $200 door buster TV? A $2,0000 OLED TV? A Kickstarter device that unexpectedly takes off? A small ICE engine? A house?
If you’re starting up a small business, selling at-a-loss widgets to gain market share do you want to be forced to publish a diagnostic manual that not only increases your work, but may also increase your liability?
Seatbelts and airbags are safety, but if you talk to anyone at a body shop, they will tell you there are significant regulation changes in the past decade that have made cars more expensive to fix while not necessarily safer.
I just don’t think it’s as cut and dry as everything must be forced to be documented. What is everything, at what size or industry is this documentation required, why this industry and not that one, is it just OBD or _everything_ including all CAN bus communication, etc. Minimally the end result is increased cost for everyone.
If it’s already published, perhaps libraries should start collecting the service manuals.
How about; if it's already documented, make it available to the end user.
The right to repair cases that bother me most is where the company goes out of their way to prevent end-user repair (cryptographic pairing of modules!?), or where service manuals/information exist but are only available to dealers.
> How about; if it's already documented, make it available to the end user.
There's documentation, and then there's documentation. What passes for documentation in the modern era is scattershot over thousands of JIRA tickets and Confluence pages. Most outdated.
Then let the "owners" and repair shops ask questions, mandate accurate replies, and "we don't know" is a valid answer if and only if you actually don't know. If you are found saying "we don't know" when you actually do know, mandatory punishment is one hundred times the purchase price of the machinery unit in question.