Re: Legislative proposal sent to my Congressman

[Matthew Petach <mpetach () netflight com>]

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon () orthanc ca> wrote:
>
[...]
> The only way to stop this sort of thing once and for all is to make it punitively costly to the humans at the helm of 
> the corporations selling this crap in the first place.  Under corporate law, this almost always means the directors.  
> Only when they start losing their homes/yachts/Jaguars, or start spending some quality time in jail, will this 
> problem go away.
>
> Of course, this does require governments to grow some balls :-P
>
> --lyndon


Please, no.

This will put a sword through the heart of open source.

If you hold the executives of the hardware manufacturer
responsible for the software running on their devices,
then the next generation of hardware from every
manufacturer is going to be hardware locked to
ONLY run their software.  No OpenWRT, no Tomato,
no third party software that could be compromised
and leave them holding the liability bag.

If you want a world in which only a handful of companies
make the hardware and software, with commensurately
higher prices, and no freedom to select what software
you'd like to load on it, I suspect this is a good path
towards it.

I think there's got to be solutions that don't drive
us into a closed-software world.  Before we start
asking the government and the lawyers to solve
this in ways we'll come to hate down the road,
let's give it a few more tries ourselves, shall we?

Thanks!

Matt