A Ton Of Folks Don’t Know What ‘Right To Repair’ Is, But Strongly Support It Once They Do https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/21/a-ton-of-folks-dont-know-what-right-to-repair-is-but-strongly-support-it-once-they-do/ #RightToRepair #technology #tech
@freetechproject @rysiek I’m a little surprised that it's not universally understood.
"Suppose that chair you're sitting in broke.”
"Yeah?”
“And you want to fix it, right?”
"Sure."
“What if someone told you it was illegal to fix it?”
"I'd laugh at them."
“There, now you get it.”
@tek no no see but a chair is not a computer! And here it's about computers! Computers are complicated and scary and magical, we can't have just anyone fixing their own computer, can we now!
To be fair, if we replaced "chair" with "a gas furnace", in some countries that would be illegal, but the reasons for that don't apply to general purpose computers.
Exactly. My point is that this is an important property to consider when substituting "chair" in that conversation, and it's useful to note that the cases we care about here are more like "chair" than "gas furnace". Many countries also have different ways of making it legal (if sometimes somewhat onerous) to maintain things that are inbetween on the scale of socialized risk (e.g. requiring an inspection by an electrician after DIY modifications of fixed electrical installation), so even in cases that are close to the gas furnace case one can do something other than outright forbidding it (though IIRC the gas furnace case itself has ~no such exceptions in Poland).