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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.

Same. Especially firmware.

It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.

There's also the thing where, if you root an Android phone, suddenly random bank apps and such try to fight back against it. This Reddit thread is very triggering.

So you reviewed with 5 stars previously, now changed to 1 star because they care about users' safety ... hmm, I see, I see.

Their company, their rules. They should be able to do whatever they want with their company.

That argument works both ways.

Edit: I'm just showing that the argument to freedom here works both ways. the same freedom the redditor is arguing form can be used by the company to do whatever they want as well.

Or this Asus forum thread. Specifically, this response from someone actually working there:

No plans for open source that I know of. Other than the complexity of making such a solution possible (there is already a ton of work required), we are also in a market which has fierce competition - one of the few things remaining outside software where vendors get to stamp their uniqueness is via UEFI and the dedicated hardware we use. We would not want to give away any of the special sauce we use to mitigate platform obstacles for others to freely copy or tinker with for example.

The timelines in which this buisiness operates is also unsuitable to support multiple solutions - it does not make sound business sense to do so in many cases and I believe this would be a similar situation.

This makes me wish for terrorism. Sadly no one is going to bomb a mobo manufacturer for these reasons. I just don't understand why it's not all leaked...

"stamp their uniqueness", lol. Maybe that would be convincing if this wasn't utter garbage. Eh

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