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.
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.