Steve Wozniak backs right-to-repair movement
What about the right to repair <i>software</i>? Or the software that runs somewhere on the hardware to make it work? There is so much firmware running on our hardware in some closed off environment and it plays an integral role in making the hardware work. Sometimes it even emulates other hardware components to save costs. To the OS it appears like the real thing, but it's just implemented in firmware code.<p>Today, if there is a bug in your firmware you are pretty much hosed even if there is nothing wrong with it, physically. Some manufacturers are better than others, but some are so bad that flashing anything but some signed firmware image will just produce a brick. Most things that require this firmware to be uploaded at runtime reject unsigned firmware. So again, if there is a bug in there and whoever made it doesn't exist or doesn't care, there is basically nothing you can do.<p>For that reason I think that anything that requires firmware, or has a mechanism to update firmware should be required to allow loading custom firmware somehow. Maybe make it a switch, or require blowing a fuse and voiding the warranty, but it should absolutely be possible to do.<p>Problem is that this is fundamentally incompatible for a lot of hardware with the way DRM is implemented. For example, on Intel systems the motherboard firmware is involved in handling HDCP and there is something similar going on with HD Audio. Same with the GuC/HuC firmware for the iGPU. It't involved with handling hardware decoding and handling HDCP. No way that could be opened up without making the DRM scheme useless.<p>So how do you repair that vulnerability in your CPU when it's already out of support? If you could at least load unsigned microcode you could at least patch it yourself, but you can't, so your CPU remainins unfixable broken even though it's physically fine.<p>Similar things could be argued for regular software, but in the case of hardware repair it goes, or should go hand in hand with repairability. Otherwise you are quite limited in what kinda thing you can repair.