"we need to regulate companies like Apple to force them to provide open platforms and to have some reasonable set of responsibilities when it comes to sunsetting older hardware"
This sort of regulation is terrible, and in my opinion should be resisted. It institutionalizes the worst tendencies of open source - free riding and slowing progress due to community restrictions.
At best, a community will be a thriving organic set of users and contributors. At worst, they are abusive parasites to the core maintainers.
The former has its own future guaranteed - customers care about a thing and are investing in it. The latter however is far more common - everyone wants something for nothing.
The world is built on organizations that need revenue to continue their mission and fulfill customer needs. Forcing companies to allocate resources to the past, the obsolete, that which customers do not want to pay for, hurts society far more than letting products die of obsolescence.
A compromise might exist where a portion of copyright law and/or taxes are allocated to preserve certain works, which would capture a balance between the economic need to create the future and the social need to preserve tradition and past practices, but that's tricky a level of nuance for policy.
This sort of regulation is terrible, and in my opinion should be resisted. It institutionalizes the worst tendencies of open source - free riding and slowing progress due to community restrictions.
At best, a community will be a thriving organic set of users and contributors. At worst, they are abusive parasites to the core maintainers.
The former has its own future guaranteed - customers care about a thing and are investing in it. The latter however is far more common - everyone wants something for nothing.
The world is built on organizations that need revenue to continue their mission and fulfill customer needs. Forcing companies to allocate resources to the past, the obsolete, that which customers do not want to pay for, hurts society far more than letting products die of obsolescence.
A compromise might exist where a portion of copyright law and/or taxes are allocated to preserve certain works, which would capture a balance between the economic need to create the future and the social need to preserve tradition and past practices, but that's tricky a level of nuance for policy.