People will get their money back and their kids, and grandkids, and great grandkids, and great great grandkids will all get to enjoy all the ewaste. Everyone wins!
Companies would rather refund your money than ever “Open Source” fucking anything.
Why? Because then they can’t charge you for the new “CarThing” two years later, when they try again with a different product.
Letting people have access “under the hood” would mean new products would be competing with the “open” CarThing.
It’s just like companies throwing out perfectly good food and getting security guards to guard the dumpster, because if people got food for free, gosh oh golly, it might bring down prices and impact profits and companies can’t have that no-no.
They will burn it all to the ground to make a profit.
Companies throw away perfectly good food because if someone ever get sick for eating they will find themselves liable and sued. It’s dumb, but that’s the game.
At least in the USA, that’s entirely not true since 1996. Good Samaritan Act protects both people who make donations and people who distribute food.
According to that article, this only covers donations to other organizations who then distribute the donated food. It doesn’t cover anyone directly donating food to individuals.
So for a restaurant, they would need to donate food to a food bank or something, and that would mean food that isn’t immediately going bad. And if that’s the case they’re probably just going to keep it and try to use it later. If they want to donate the leftover food at the end of the day they can’t use anymore, there probably isn’t any time left other than to just give it to some homeless people outside the restaurant, which this act doesn’t protect against.
Which then just raises the question for me, why isn’t this also protected against? The act already states that the food has to be seemingly good condition, so you can’t just serve mold and say it was a gift. What’s the harm in feeding homeless people?
But does it protect a company who is throwing out food that someone then eats? They aren’t a good Samaritan in that case.
And even if it’s lawful federally, they may run against local ordinances.
And even if every single thing is above board, that still doesn’t stop them from getting sued. It just means they’d win. But legal costs being what they are, it’s probably cheaper to just run off anybody who might be litigious before something can happen.
If you’re pulling it from a dumpster, no judge in their right mind would opt to hear an argument about how the people who threw it IN A DUMPSTER are at fault for someone getting sick. Regardless of if the food were that off or not, dumpsters themselves are hardly hygienic…
Why? Because then they can’t charge you for the new “CarThing” two years later, when they try again with a different product.
Like, your concern is that someone has monopoly access and is trying to limit supply for a control pad on the dash? Can’t agree. There’s not a lot of ability to limit access to that.
If you want to, you can rig up some kind of dash-mounted control pad for your smartphone. Like, get old Android phone, put mpd client on it, connect to mpd server running on your regular phone, stick old Android phone to dash.
The issue is that Spotify is a private corporation. Making something OSS is not in their interest, only using something OSS is.
The only reason why they are even considering refunding purchases, is because they created a shitstorm large enough to become a large blip on FTC’s radar. Not to mention potential class-action suits. They settled on the fastest and least painful method, albeit after a ton of threats
Refunding a shit ton of money to give up on a product and tank customer satisfaction is not in their interest either.
Customer satisfaction seems to matter less and less in this day and age. Most people have fully accepted the corpos treating them like garbage
Of course, but that implies that the people behind Spotify aren’t shortsighted capitalists, only keeping immediate monetary gain in their perspective
Them calling it “Car Thing” makes me feel like I’m reading The Onion.
Coming up with good product naming and marketing costs money, and Spotify are clearly too busy pocketing all of it
