Ask Lemmy

I think it's instead useful to notice how weird it is that we have Open Source desktops and laptops at all.

Basically nothing else in our society works this way. Basically nothing has changeable firmware. It's practically a quirk of history that x86 was cloned and reverse-engineered and had a bunch of competitors spring up making compatible but swappable hardware that was all interoperable. It became an ecosystem, basically because of corporate piracy, rather than anything else. My hardware needed to work like the others or I wasn't in the club, and my next generation hardware needed to be backwards compatible with the club or I was out of the club. And laptops were just desktop parts made smaller, so they ran whatever the club ran.

It's practically a quirk of history that early computers didn't have enough ROM to do anything useful, and so they needed to be coded from scratch every time you booted them. And when we got tired of doing that, we attached external storage like punch cards and tapes and hard drives and floppy disks that we controlled from outside the computer and essentially just programmed the computer for us because the ROM needed input and it was a lot to type. And because we could control it from outside, we could put different disks in on different days and it would do different stuff.

My microwave didn't work that way. My VCR didn't work that way. My digital camera didn't work that way.

So the way phones work is a regression to the mean. The reason open source on phones sucks is because the hardware is specific to my model and manufacturer, but because the components aren't removable or swappable there's no ecosystem. I can't take parts from a Motorola phone and use them in a Samsung phone, so there's no standard. As long as Motorola ships a device that works with its hardware, it doesn't matter that it won't work on LG hardware. And vice-versa. And so long as Motorola's next phone ships with firmware that suits that hardware, it doesn't matter that it's totally different incompatible hardware with last year's model.

So every single phone that comes out has some hardware no one's figured out yet, but it may be unique to that one year and manufacturer and model, and so until it gets reverse engineered your phone just won't work. And then the next year a completely different device gets released, so there's no momentum to keep investigating the old hardware because no new person will ever have it again. It's not a good way to foster a community, with a shifting landscape of small minorities, brought together only by which device they happen to use, and breaking apart every time someone upgrades to a new device.

So long story short, if we want the situation to improve, we need to produce laws that require things to be an ecosystem. We need to force compatibility where it doesn't make financial sense, we need to force things to be swappable, we need to force things to be flashable, we need to force things to be removable, replaceable, and repairable. We can't hope it just happens again like it did for desktops, we need to make sure it does.