It would be an interesting experiment if we could have a real alternative of sustainable and durable products to the fashion-driven throw away stuff. On one side, fashion seems to be in peoples genes, as most(?) are easily motivated to throw away perfectly good clothes for staying in fashion, which is nothing else than to trick them with group conformity into regarding their existing stuff to be obsolete. Considering that people can be tricked with group conformity to club their neighbors to death in wars, this isn’t as surprising as it may seem at first …

On the other hand not all obsolescence is planned obsolescence. Since our technological development storms ahead at an immensely quick pace, a significant amount of obsolescence is unavoidable.

One could make a case that open sourcing requires some technological plateau at which technological progress slows enough to allow actors to refine the technology beyond the mere development-production-obsolescence cycle. In computers, the Unix operating system resembled this technological plateau as PC operating systems were stagnating around the absymally designed Microsoft Windows in the 90s, a window of opportunity opened for Linux as an open source alternative for small computers, focusing on different goals like consistency and stability, for which Unix provided the freely available technological base (no basic research needed for Linux).

On the other hand, in current mobile phone development fast innovating Apple seems to make it rather difficult for open source alternatives in phone operating systems.

On the third hand the economics of these fast product-life-cycles are based on cheap unlimited resources, which are considered externalities (somebody will conquer another continent after we drained out this one, and there will be natives selling us their stuff for glass beads …). Once all continents are industrialized that story is over, and new windows for sustainable stories might open …