After the EU “right to repair” should there perhaps be a “right to longevity” for connected objects, to enable them to be reanimated by open-source code and platforms once they have had their motivating spirit of software removed by the shuttering of whatever service they were originally the avatar of?
I reanimated my Little Printer last year with the help of the good folks at Nord, who in turn were able to do that because Matt Webb had open-sourced the code when BERG’s Little Printer / Bergcloud shut down.
Google just announced that they are to shutter Stadia. I was an early adopter – and have one of the quite handsome Stadia controllers. It’s a really nice games controller! Look – it even got a mini documentary about it’s design engineering presented by Baratunde Thurston!
So – as Stuart Horton says:
Indeed!
And let’s not stop there – let’s mandate that anything that is manufactured with atoms, but animated by software and services *must* have it’s firmware at minimum open-sourced if the service is shutting down.
Feels like a good bit of ‘endineering‘
Allow old phones, aibos, connected juicers, jibos, Nabaztags to rise like polycarbonate phoenixes from their slumbers.
An EU right-to-longevity might keep more atoms out of landfill by letting the bits be free.
Update 2023-01-17: Stadia team are working on making the controller work with other devices / Bluetooth https://9to5google.com/2023/01/15/stadia-controller-bluetooth-certification/
Petafloptimism 
[…] The right to longevity TRUST – Good framing “After the EU “right to repair” should there perhaps be a “right to longevity” for connected objects, to enable them to be reanimated by open-source code and platforms once they have had their motivating spirit of software removed by the shuttering of whatever service they were originally the avatar of? “ […]