Companies should release the source code for discontinued products

Inspired by the death of the Flip camera, Make magazine's Phil Torrone has a call-to-arms for companies that discontinue their projects: "If You're Going To Kill It, Open Source It!" He catalogs a long list of dead products whose firmware remain locked up even though the companies that made them are through with them, from the Aibo to to the Palm Pilot.

Another week, another company killing off a giant product after spending millions of dollars and years developing. Back in 2009 Cisco bought Pure Digital Technology's Flip. Gadget fans and makers were puzzled by this; phones were just about good enough to start beating the Flip. Now, it's heading for the landfill.
Some companies fail, some kill off product lines that are not profitable, but in the end, where does all the knowledge go? Nowhere, usually. In a world of disposable everything, is it time that we demand companies do what's good for humankind in addition to the bottom line?
If companies are going to just kill something off, why not open source it? Some companies do just that, and others, like Nokia, will promise open source (Symbian, dead product) and then quickly reverse itself, locking it up. Pictured above, a Nokia coffin.

If You're Going To Kill It, Open Source It!

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Anonymous

Anybody remember the Brief programmers editor? In it’s day it was great and despite several half-hearted offers to open-source it, Borland didn’t.
Anonymous

I’ve been thinking about this idea for a little while and actually got the domain name releasethedrivers.org. I would happily hand it over to anyone that was serious about pursuing this.

I was thinking about all the PC hardware I have that I need to throw away because the companies that made it are no longer developing drivers for new Operating Systems. That’s when it hit me. There should be an advocacy group that pressures companies to release driver software to the open source community if they stop supporting a product. By having the Open Source community take over the development of hardware drivers for End-of-Life products the hardware no longer needs to end up in a landfill. The hardware continues to be relevant beyond its traditional life-cycle.

I think there is also a story here for manufacturers about reducing support costs for legacy devices. It also limits exposure for WEEE compliance since its less likely to come back to them if it’s still useful. So it could be a win-win-win for the Environment, Customer, and Manufacturer.

I agree some companies may view this from a negative angle and many have. That’s where the advocacy group would come in -to ask the question publicly. Ideally this would force the decision before them to be either keep supporting the device or set it free. Turning it into garbage should no longer be an unscrutinized option… As for the market for replacements, technology always moves forward. Those who keep the old stuff do so because they have to more than anything else. Most who can buy new still will. E.g. A tech company is not going to keep 10BT server NICs they are going to get gig or 10gig. So this would create a second life-cycle for that old hardware amongst non-traditional customers that aren’t buying the latest stuff anyway and 3rd world markets.
Anonymous

If only this could happen to Ecco Professional, the greatest PIM program ever devised. Support stopped in 1998, it never had proper Email integration… but I’d use it before any other PIM even today. It’d be perfect for iPads and iPhones, too.
victorvodka

bittorrent should be used as a sort of wikileaks for the sourcecode of abandoned projects. all of us developers have source code for long-abandoned projects (anybody want the ASP-MS SQL code behind Collegeclub.com circa 1999? — i thought not). it’s easy for us to anonymously release it into the public domain. such things are already routinely done for compiled code of obsolete equipment — such as the ROM of the old Commodore 64.
Anonymous

Because if I can’t make money on it, screw you, consumer.
turn_self_off

This would break the back of the capitalist camel, as it would basically be to go back to the pre-ww2 way of maintaining rather then consumerist wholesale replacement.

Hell, i have seen a washing machine that was mostly wires, relays and a couple of electric motors finally give up the ghost because it was about to structurally implode from rust. And that machine was some 30+ years old. I will be surprised if the replacement machine last 10. And not because it will structurally fail, but because some plastic thing inside it will outlast its engineered for lifetime; and there will be no replacement part to be had for it (except replacing the whole machine).

Basically we humans are now capable of making something that with a bit of elbow grease can outlast our generation and perhaps the next, but to keep the capitalist system running we instead engineer it to fail at a much earlier time and make sure the only option is wholesale replacement. But then we should have seen this camel coming down the road when we changed from marketing for logical needs to marketing for animal mating instincts.
- Ito Kagehisa
  
  Mrs. Kagehisa says to plan on every appliance lasting exactly half as long as the appliance being replaced.
  
  I have sometimes found this prescription to be overly optimistic.
bardfinn

There’s also the NSA to consider; No company wants to run afoul of a national security gag order to not reveal the backdoor built into their product for the convenience of intelligence gathering.
kevinsky

A friend left me his old AppleTV when he moved to Europe, and it’s pretty neat, but limited. I wish they’d opened it up with a final software update before they EOL’d it.
kevinsky

Although to be fair, if they’d opened up the AppleTV1, none of us who are in possession of one would ever consider an AppleTV2.
On the other hand, the AppleTV1 was a fair chunk more expensive… not that I paid for mine
daen

I’m still convinced that the truly canny companies will realize that there is a huge and valuable opportunity here.

If you’re clever about it.

Cisco presumably was listening to its beancounters when it dumped the Flip after having spent $590mn on buying it in 2009 – even while the paste on new posters advertising the Flip in BART stations in SF was still drying (this is true).

Some genius MBA with a huge spreadsheet presumably persuaded the higher-ups that this was a brilliant strategy.

Cisco, I predict, will not still be a multi-billion dollar company by mid-decade if they continue that trend of uselessness.
traalfaz

It’s probably not that easy. Most commercial products probably contain libraries and such which were, in turn, purchased and can’t be released into open source. They may also contain significant chunks of code which may still contain either trade secrets or be common with ongoing products. Releasing code that may be common with current products may enable hacking (for either good or evil purposes) that the company may not want to enable on their ongoing products (or, for that matter their old products).

If someone owns and is still using a phone that the manufacturer stops making, then the manufacturer releases the code and as a result an attack on that phone, perhaps a bug allowing access to the contact list via bluetooth or something, is discovered, it makes the company look bad even though the product is discontinued.
- TheCrawNotTheCraw
  
  Spot-on; nice to see a high quality post like yours.
  
  Another issue is liability: Companies don’t want to be bothered with claims which may arise from hacked products, whether those products are current or discontinued, as turn_self_off noted.
  
  I have to say, I don’t blame them.
  
  Finally, what is the commercial incentive for companies to do this? Good will? That argument won’t convince the various top management hard-asses that I’ve had to work with, over the years.
  
  I may hate the idea that a company doesn’t let me tamper with their product, but unless one of the selling features is that it is user-customizable, they aren’t selling an Erector Set.
  
  And taking-care of old products is Sustaining Engineering, which most engineers hate as it’s a career dead-end. Most companies have lousy engineering documentation, and they wouldn’t want to make that public anyway.
  
  I’ve seen // HACK! in (other people’s) source code code (and my own) enough times to know that companies don’t want outsiders to see that.
  - daen
    
    While the risk of liability may decline as a product is phased out, it’s there whether the product is current or discontinued. If the brakes fail on your car because of a previously-undiscovered design flaw (as opposed to bad maintenance by the owner/s), your company is just as liable whether the car is still being made or not.
    
    Good grief. Use your imagination (which is also something a great many of the ‘top management hard-asses’ lack) … If companies play it right, they will build a network of enthusiasts doing cool hacks and bug fixes for free on old code. And if that network is willing to work for free on maintaining and supporting out-of-date products, they might just be willing and able to provide high-quality feedback on new products too. That’s potentially a huge time and cost saving vs the relatively small cost of providing someone inside the company tasked with liaising with that network.
    - turn_self_off
      
      Unless you can dump a X page report with numbers and graphs about this on some big name economists desk, there is no way in hell any MBA will take such aspects seriously. It is all about numbers, and the lower the time to break even and the higher the ROI the more likely it will be accepted (so that the big boys can cash their bonuses and stock options and leave before the ship sinks).
- Tamooj
  
  100% correct about the lackof motivation; it’s far worse than just the possibility of bad PR; if someone were to expose a vulnerability or craft an exploit, the company could suddenly become liable for any damages wrought. So when an executive is told “We can make this open source” what they really hear is “We should let ten thousand hackers look under the hood of this non-revenue-producing product just to see if we made any mistakes anywhere – and then droves of shyster lawyers can rabble-rouse up a class-action lawsuits”. Yeah, that sounds like a good plan.
  
  I suspect that it we really want to see open sourcing become a viable and common part of the product end-of-life-cycle process, then we will have to come up with a clever tort law adjustments first. GPL (and variations) was a clever and innovative way for devs to share their work without becoming fresh meat for the IP / copyright legal culture – Perhaps we could come up with an equivalent to the GPL in the tort arena?
  - turn_self_off
    
    Actually i think i have seen a Nokia representative make basically such a statement about the closed source parts of the Nokia Maemo tablets. They where highly worried about legal issues resulting in people tampering with the power control software. This likely because they have in the past had troubles with overheating batteries. Tho a unnamed engineer also aired that the team responsible for the code was downright embarrassed about its lack of good workmanship.
    
    Then again, Nokia is one of those companies that never officially declare a product EOL. They simply stop producing it and let the retailers figure it out for themselves.
- Psymiley
  
  Ahh – I was beaten to it!
Psymiley

Not to mention the companies that will simply destroy hardware, etc, rather than sell it off cheap.
Sometimes an insurance thing, true – but some money is better than none/disposing costs.

I think a lot of code that ‘dies’ with its product, may still live in other products of theirs or partners too, so getting someone to strip the code (who understands it enough to know where and what to remove), may be a cost issue or results in pointless, unusable code.
There may be a support fear – people may still bug the company with questions.

The other hand also shows lack of interest:
The Linksys DMA-2100/2200 had released its source.
Users wanted the box to support a codec (which it supported, just under another hat).
No middle-man existed – no user seemed to be a coder also, able to compile and use the code.
arielariel

I would settle for companies releasing the service manual on analog objects they no longer make! It isn’t as if I am taking food off the table of the families of VCR repairwomen at this point.

Sometimes you just want to get in, find what you need to do, and get out vs. hacking it out yourself.
Shart Tsung

Stupid idea. Not going to happen.
- pt
  
  it already *has* happened, many of us do “open source hardware” and we thought about how we can always have our designs available even if we stop making them.
Tamooj

(and I shall now go find more coffee, since my grammar filters seem to be offline – apologies to all)
Brainspore

Great idea for consumers, terrible idea for the companies.

1. Less motivation for consumers to buy new products.

2. Competitors have access to code you spent precious time and resources developing instead of having to write their own from scratch.

3. This could expose security vulnerabilities to past, current and future products. It’s not like manufacturers start over every time they make something new.

4. Legal restrictions for Intellectual Property- code could contain anything from trade secrets to proprietary fonts.

Again, as a consumer this sounds like a great idea to ME. But if I was CEO of Nokia I’d be hard-pressed to think of a way the benefits of releasing that code could outweigh the liabilities.
LennStar

Never ever. People could get the silly idea of using old hardware instead of buying new!

That would be more eco-friendly but would – far more important – lower sales!!!

Please repeat your lesson about “planned obsolescence” before ever saying such stupid things!!!
victorvodka

perhaps if our tax structure was changed to encourage the placing of IP into the public domain this could be made to happen. if a company could declare a write-off by doing so, they might put unpublishable books and music in the public domain as well. of course, getting there will require legislatures with a few more MIPs/watt in the brainpan than are presently in evidence.