[legislation-discuss] My FOSS-related LSRs (bills) in drafting for next year here in New Hampshire

[Eric Gallager]

Hello, just writing with an update on the LSRs (Legislative Support Requests, which are the things that become bills) that I'm filing for next year here in the New Hampshire legislature:


  *   LSR 24-2327, relative to the right to repair certain educational technology. This is a pretty basic right-to-repair bill, allowed in the second year of the term because it's targeting a separate product for R2R that's different from this year's bill (next year's is edtech, this year's is home appliances). There are specific provisions about software in here, as software is often an important tool for repairing devices like Chromebooks.
  *   LSR 24-2328, relative to the right to review source code in certain eviction proceedings. This is basically to give tenants a defense against proprietary rent-setting technology such as YieldStar, which ProPublica reported on here: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent YieldStar's proprietary nature makes it impossible to tell if landlords using it are engaging in price-fixing, so hopefully the possibility that this could be exposed will encourage landlords to be open about the algorithms they use to set rent instead.
  *   LSR 24-2428, relative to the autism registry. This one might not sound FOSS-related at first, but it is. Current law allows the state to contract out to a 3rd party for maintenance of the state's autism registry, which means that they can store it in proprietary software. The idea with this legislation is that by bringing it back under state control, we can free the software used to store this registry, while also enhancing the privacy protections on it, and reducing some of the ableism in the current statute's language.

Also, while looking back at my list of filed LSRs, I'm realizing I missed an opportunity to include some language about FOSS in LSR 24-2330 (relative to prohibiting employers from using polygraph testing), but I guess I can always change that in an amendment later in the process... anyways, there's nothing here quite as sweeping as the bills that I filed for this year of the term, but House rules prevent me from bringing them back until next term, so they'll have to wait. I don't think that the language for these bills is available publicly on our legislature's website yet, but I'll send another email to this list once they are.
Thanks,
Eric Gallager


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