This is illegal in Australia. A customer can reasonably expect that if they pay $300 for an electronic thermostat then it will function for a reasonable amount of time, otherwise the manufacturer will repair or refund/replace. The reasonable amount of time in this case, particularly for a $300 thermostat, would be at least 5 and probably at least 10 years.
Same in the Netherlands. Not sure there is legal precedence but warranty law says a product should keep working as long as 'reasonably expected'. This means you don't get 1 or 2 years of warranty, but potentially fifty if that would be reasonable. If the seller (they can't forward you to the manufacturer or anyone else, either) refuses however, I suppose there is little short of a lawsuit that will help you through.
I believe that's the same for the whole of the EU. The fact they were still on sale 18 months ago would make this pretty open and shut, as there's a mandatory 2 year warranty. The question is whether these were sold in the EU.
In Australia, you make a complaint to the ACCC and they will take all
the legal action for you after they investigate.
Apple was probably the most famous case of where this occurred, but Samsung, HP and other well known brands are now super careful not to violate the law. It's very expensive and dreadful PR if they do, and they have no way of winning.
I think legally as the market grows there will be only a couple of possible outcomes.
The company will have to release a binary or open source a product that will allow the consumer or someone else to run a server that maintains all the functions of the last supported release and/or the hardware itself will have to be able to function indefinitely with the same feature set as the last release.
Its illogical to expect that Nest would continue to support and fund a product that they didn't want and wasn't bringing in any new revenue, but as a consumer it will make no sense to ever buy an IoT product that doesn't have a guarantee of working exactly the same as the last update.
It doesn't solve the issue of company planned obsolescence, but it atleast gives expectations to both sides of what to expect from a current hardware device.
There ahould be a law that when a company goes bankrupt, the source becomes public domain. After all, the public compensate for the losses. And this law should apply to discontinued products, and discontinued features. Like Parse or Google Reader.
Open software is a huge step on civilization, so we should work on making most of it public-domain by default.
Except that most of these products have proprietary components that are merely licensed. The company that goes bankrupt doesn't even possess the source code let alone the right to make it public.
There was a case that passed through the courts yesterday, Steam tried to exclude these warranties. They didn't get far with that. Source : http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/03/australian-federal-court-f...