>> If a producer goes out of business they should be forced to
Going out of business is a loaded expression yhat covers many scenarios.
For example if my company is acquired am I 'going out of business' ?
If I go bankrupt then my assets are sold off to pay creditors. Certainly the IP is an asset and it ultimately turns up somewhere. Releasing it before sale would be illegal in some places (disposing of assets while the business is insolvent for below-market value. )
I know what we experience are abandoned PalmOS devices, but fundamentally PalmOS is owned by a legitimate company and has some nominal value.
I think mandating requirements on the owner is a better approach. They reduce the asset value, so if it doesn't sell it could be released as public domain. But that in turn gets very complicated if there are multiple code suppliers, and the downstream goes bust, but upstream is fine.
Going out of business is a loaded expression yhat covers many scenarios.
For example if my company is acquired am I 'going out of business' ?
If I go bankrupt then my assets are sold off to pay creditors. Certainly the IP is an asset and it ultimately turns up somewhere. Releasing it before sale would be illegal in some places (disposing of assets while the business is insolvent for below-market value. )
I know what we experience are abandoned PalmOS devices, but fundamentally PalmOS is owned by a legitimate company and has some nominal value.
I think mandating requirements on the owner is a better approach. They reduce the asset value, so if it doesn't sell it could be released as public domain. But that in turn gets very complicated if there are multiple code suppliers, and the downstream goes bust, but upstream is fine.