I wrote:
I would claim that the moral right to run whatever software we wish on hardware we own is a negative right; it doesn't put any obligation on another party to help you do it. If you can hack up Fedora to run on a Nokia Windows phone, more power to you, but Nokia and Microsoft aren't obligated to help you do it, and aren't legally prohibited from doing things that make it difficult for you to exercise your moral right.
Andrew Haley wrote:
I think I'd disagree with you there. I don't think it's any different from someone using extensive technical measures to prevent anyone other than the authorized dealers of a particular car from servicing it. Such a move would be treated as anti-competitive in many countries, and IMO software should be treated in the same way.
If the things that make it difficult to run software of your choosing on a device can be proven to serve no purpose but to stifle competition, then yes. But often those things have other purposes as well. For example, requiring firmware updates to be signed has a demonstrable purpose in preventing certain types of malware from infecting a product, so that feature cannot be said to serve no purpose other but to stifle competition.
Eric -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
