New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Should forced auto-upgrades be made illegal in a right to repair world?
Ask HN: Should forced auto-upgrades be made illegal in a right to repair world?
2 by fouc | 0 comments on Hacker News.
* To be clear, I'm talking about forced auto-upgrades that give no option to downgrade. The right to repair is mostly about hardware. But it's hard to ignore the software part of hardware. And that means having the right to keep and run old versions of software. Old software that work perfectly fine and do their job. Forced auto-upgrades are fundamentally hostile to the user's freedoms. Ever since the browsers introduced forced auto-upgrades, we've been moving away from an open web to an internet of closed silos. Forced auto-upgrades is often justified in the name of security. It's not worth it. The "good intention" of improving security through forced auto-upgrades is pushing us down the road to hell. In a way, we developers are responsible for all of this. We all jumped on the Chrome bandwagon, we all told our friends & families to use Chrome, we all enjoyed the reduced browser market fragmentation after the forced auto-upgrades were introduced. We loved not having to support old browsers anymore. We loved being able to use the latest and greatest browser features. We get angry because Safari is "holding us back". But at what cost? Developing for work & for money might've become easier, but what about developing for yourself? As a power user, in control over your own computer? The internet has been getting more and more hostile to alternative ways of interaction, especially as browser market share turns into a monoculture. We need to encourage more fragmentation in software. We need to encourage both browser fragmentation, version fragmentation, OS fragmentation. We need to fight against the "winner take all" distribution. We need to fight against the tendency to jump on bandwagons. This constant pressure to upgrade all software (again often in the name of security) is also leaving many good software behind. Old software that worked great in their particular milieu. (How can we preserve the milieu of all these software and easily run them in light weight VMs?)
2 by fouc | 0 comments on Hacker News.
* To be clear, I'm talking about forced auto-upgrades that give no option to downgrade. The right to repair is mostly about hardware. But it's hard to ignore the software part of hardware. And that means having the right to keep and run old versions of software. Old software that work perfectly fine and do their job. Forced auto-upgrades are fundamentally hostile to the user's freedoms. Ever since the browsers introduced forced auto-upgrades, we've been moving away from an open web to an internet of closed silos. Forced auto-upgrades is often justified in the name of security. It's not worth it. The "good intention" of improving security through forced auto-upgrades is pushing us down the road to hell. In a way, we developers are responsible for all of this. We all jumped on the Chrome bandwagon, we all told our friends & families to use Chrome, we all enjoyed the reduced browser market fragmentation after the forced auto-upgrades were introduced. We loved not having to support old browsers anymore. We loved being able to use the latest and greatest browser features. We get angry because Safari is "holding us back". But at what cost? Developing for work & for money might've become easier, but what about developing for yourself? As a power user, in control over your own computer? The internet has been getting more and more hostile to alternative ways of interaction, especially as browser market share turns into a monoculture. We need to encourage more fragmentation in software. We need to encourage both browser fragmentation, version fragmentation, OS fragmentation. We need to fight against the "winner take all" distribution. We need to fight against the tendency to jump on bandwagons. This constant pressure to upgrade all software (again often in the name of security) is also leaving many good software behind. Old software that worked great in their particular milieu. (How can we preserve the milieu of all these software and easily run them in light weight VMs?)
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