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California legislators are considering drafting laws that would make it easier to fix things. It is now the 18th state in the US trying to make it easier to repair or modify things, electronic or not.
Right to repair legislation has considerable momentum this year; 18 states have introduced it, and several states have held hearings about the topic. In each of these states, big tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, John Deere, and AT&T and trade associations they're associated with have heavily lobbied against it, claiming that allowing people to fix their things would cause safety and security concerns. Thus far, companies have been unwilling to go on the record to explain the specifics about how these bills would be dangerous or would put device and consumer security in jeopardy.
It's particularly notable that the battle has come to California because many of the companies that have fought against it are headquartered there. Apple, for instance, told lawmakers in Nebraska that passing a right to repair bill there would turn the state into a "Mecca for hackers." The Electronic Frontier Foundation—which is notoriously concerned about digital security—has explicitly backed this legislation in California. Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney for the EFF, said that the bill "helps preserve the right of individual device owners to understand and fix their property."
Yep. Hackers. And note that is what Apple does not want. Like many things this boils down to the issue of who controls the many computers you ostensibly own.
From Motherboard at vice.com: The Right to Repair Battle Has Come to Silicon Valley.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @10:51PM
Some people a while back got the code into buildable form and found the necessary toolchain bits to actually roll new ISO images off it. While definitely not kosher from a BSA/copyright lobby standpoint, it offers lots of REALLY FUN possibilities, like paravirtualized NT4 for non-kvm xen/qemu, GPT support and ntldr booting for >2TB disks on BIOS. Support for 64GB of RAM on any legacy PAE systems.
One of the biggest possibilities if some was willing to do the machine learning work and open source it: Automated Reverse engineering of every NT kernel based version of windows using the NT4 sourcecode as a training platform for decompilation.
Given decompiled versions of Windows 2000, XP, and XP x64/2003 it should be possible to support a LOT of newer drivers on the NT4 codebase, as well as have the code necessary to provide key source code snapshots for different later NT build versions, eventually allowing full emulation even for DRM for running applications that can't or won't be ported to other operating systems or windows versions.
From there driver reverse engineering can be carried out to help document and then develop drivers for hardware that has long been abandoned by its developers, allowing both code and hardware reuse wherever it is needed.
Machine learning, combined with source code and signing key leaks is the future of technology. If right to repair in a sensible form comes to exist, that will just make it all the better.