General > General Technical Chat
Right to repair, my problem with it
Brumby:
The bottom line in the fundamentals of Right To Repair don't really insist on the enforcement of parts being made available. It's more in the direction that access to parts should not be blocked.
Allow suppliers the freedom to sell components, assemblies or whatever and let open market economics dictate what is available and for how long. If a manufacturer or other party has an interest in the intellectual property for something, then, by all means, add a royalty into the pricing - as long as it's not onerous.
Even Louis Rossmann has said (and I'm paraphrasing) he'd be happy to pay $20 for a $5 (retail) chip to do repairs rather than having to harvest it from a $100(plus) product - which he has done.
Some people are reading "Force the manufacturer to carry repair inventory" into the argument - which I can see is one direction this can go - but it's the practice of blocking access which needs to be outlawed, at the very least.
Psi:
A forced spare parts system, if one existed, would encourage manufactures to use off-the-shelf parts wherever available. If no off-the-shelf part currently exists, they would want to get a company that specializes in those type of parts to add one to their publicly available range. Not necessarily a stocked range, but something that could be ordered by anyone. (I'm thinking about generic things here, pulleys, belts, wheels, generic gate ICs etc, not ASICs or anything IP related)
If there's a market for a part someone will buy 5000 from that manufacturer, or whatever the min order run is, and then resell them.
It means that the manufacture has only a very small number of spare parts they themselves need to supply.
It's only really things like ASICs or other stuff that has IP or for which blocking competitors from using it is desirable.
I think we can all agree that using a standard or protocol is better than inventing your own one in 99% of cases.
It should be the same for parts.
Sal Ammoniac:
--- Quote from: ataradov on November 03, 2021, 02:50:41 am ---Having to manage a warehouse of those spare parts and logistics of shipping them one by one is a nightmare.
--- End quote ---
DigiKey and Mouser seem to have no problems doing this. I can (and have) order a single resistor from them.
ataradov:
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on November 03, 2021, 04:32:19 pm ---DigiKey and Mouser seem to have no problems doing this. I can (and have) order a single resistor from them.
--- End quote ---
Yes, but this is their entire job.
If I make a tea kettle or a microwave oven, and I make some non-standard part for them, then I will now have to turn into DigiKey and start doing retail shipping of individual parts. And all of a sudden I have to handle personal information for a lot of people (which in EU will require to have another position filled). And before all of that all I had to do is ship a container of assembled and packaged products to retail distributors.
Or I will have to somehow make an agreement with likes of DigiKey to distribute my part. But DigiKey will not do it for free, and likely require ongoing payments for warehouse storage for items that don't move a lot.
Sal Ammoniac:
--- Quote from: ataradov on November 03, 2021, 04:55:13 pm ---Or I will have to somehow make an agreement with likes of DigiKey to distribute my part. But DigiKey will not do it for free, and likely require ongoing payments for warehouse storage for items that don't move a lot.
--- End quote ---
I think this model could work. Parts are small, and the costs of warehousing them shouldn't be prohibitive. Manufacturers could work with DigiKey to set up BOMs for their products to make it easy to find and order parts needed for repairs.
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