BraveSirZaphod

The funny thing about Lemmygrad people is that you could tell me that this comment was an intentional caricature and it’d seem just as likely as it being genuine.

Violent revolution because of an operating system is genuinely one of the most terminally online ideas I think I’ve ever read in my life.

It’s not that genuine passion and altruism isn’t acknowledged; the entire open source software world is a testament to that.

You asked for an explanation as to why Free modern hardware hasn’t been developed yet. The simple answer is that passion and altruism has not yet been a strong enough incentive to motivate anyone to do it. He’s not accusing you of being lazy or hypocritical. The reason why you haven’t done it yet is the exact same reason why anyone else who could do it also hasn’t done it yet. It’s very very hard, and passion doesn’t pay the bills or feed you. Limited to a hobby, it’s simply more work than most people could ever hope to achieve in their spare time.

It’s more complicated than sheer greed.

The fact of the matter is that actually producing any modern technology takes a massive amount of work, and up til this point, no one has gathered enough motivation and free time to do it all for any modern hardware just out of pure altruism. There’s a reason why companies have to pay hundreds of engineers a huge amount of money to get anything developed; those people are not going to do this incredibly difficult work just for fun and moral satisfaction. It’s easy to point the finger at corporate greed for some things being locked down, and to be clear, there’s plenty of valid criticism to go around, but it has to be at least considered that most of this stuff would never have been developed in the first place if it wasn’t for those same companies. Your average person is not going to assemble a motherboard from parts and schematics.

Wouldn’t anyone just be curious to figure out how stuff works?

To this point, quite frankly, no. Average people simply do not care about this very much. They want to just turn on their magic internet box, get their work done, play their games, consume their media, and move on without any further fuss. The fact of the matter is that most people have no clue what a BIOS is, could not care less if it was proprietary or not, and have zero interest in learning about flashing them or why they would ever want to do that.

There’s a case to be made that it suggests some kind of affiliation with the company. A consumer may think he’s an officially licensed repairman.

It’d be a stronger case if it was just the logo of the product, not the logo of the company.

Espresso is the line I won’t let myself cross (and I don’t have the counter space lol), but the $350 for the Kinu M47 was hard to swallow.

Plus side, it’s also a great espresso grinder if I do ever eventually head down that road.