On 2026-02-24 08:56:31 -0500 (-0500), Theodore Tso wrote: [...]
And it's not just the cost differential; if the truly open hardware solution has a third the battery life, and double the thickness of say, an Macbook Air running MacOS, trying to demand that everyone make the same prioritize choices as yours or face condemnation of being somehow morally compromised --- might cause large numbers of users to write off the purely ideological advocates as hopelessly out of touch elitists.
[...]
Add regulatory challenges to the list. For example, in some jurisdictions it's illegal to distribute radio hardware capable of receiving or broadcasting at specific frequencies, and which frequencies are legal varies from location to location; so if a manufacturer wants to impose those limits in software in order not to have to produce different circuitry for every part of the world they sell their device in, they can't legally make at least some parts of that source code available.
I'm not above a bit of civil disobedience from time to time, but I'm not going to look down on people who don't feel comfortable flaunting their country's laws just to prove a point about firmware freedom.
-- Jeremy Stanley
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