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Comment by 746F7475 | Hacker News Reader

Am I only one who doesn't see a problem here? Sure it would be nice if company X allowed me to use cheaper Chinese knock-offs with their product, but to me, they are well within their rights to decide: "hey, we don't want competitors to benefit from our product(s)"

In essense Phillips put money into R&D and marketing and if you are to believe the linked article into making smart lightbulbs mainstream. That shit is not cheap so why would they give money for their competitors? This move forces others to build their own base system and what not, which is fair.

I am sure you can find open{source|hardware} alternative if you don't wish to support Phillips anymore.

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You might be the only one. What if you bought a car, and after you bought it, the manufacturer of the car announced that they have remotely flashed the car's computer and now you can only drive to work, and if you want to drive anywhere else you have to buy 'tickets' for $5 per trip, or the car will refuse to run.

The point is that when you buy a thing, it is yours. When you own a thing, you are within your rights to do whatever you want with it, so long is it is legal. If makers of things can retroactively impose restrictions on the thing's use, then you have no rights whatsoever and anything that you own is yours to use only so long as whoever manufactured it feels like your use is maximizing it's profits.

Your car metaphor is completely off. It's not like Philips updated your lights to only light up in specific location.

But cars are a good example, say your automatic shifter breaks. There are no real third party options, you've pretty much got to buy a new one from the manufacturer or by used one. You can still do all normal car things with it you just can't use third party pieces. Same with the lights, they still work, they shine light and do everything that they did before now you JUST can't use third party bulbs with the system.

If you want to go with other shitty analogies say you made a game, something like an MMO that has monthly fees. You sank a lot of money developing the game, the box price isn't high because you know you'll make your money from the monthly fees. You also use money from the monthly fees to improve the game, fix bugs, add content. Now your subscription model is a little strange, it works by players entering a code on your website. They buy it from your online store, get it in their email and use it to get play time. Now let's imagine that your security isn't absolute and some third party figures out how your keycode generator works and they start selling codes for half the price. Now your paying subscriber count is shrinking. What do you do? Do you A) fix the problem which results into many users losing money since they already bought several months worth of play time from this company? or B) leave the system as it is because openness or something like that?

> to me, they are well within their rights to decide: "hey, we don't want competitors to benefit from our product(s)"

I'd say: the products cease to be theirs when a someone buys them, and the consumer is the one who benefits from being able to choose competitor's products.

Toyota did a lot of work designing my car, but they don't get a monopoly on selling me carpet mats. It's my car and I'll put what I want in there.

> I am sure you can find open{source|hardware} alternative if you don't wish to support Phillips anymore.

True, but if you bought something expecting interoperability and it was "upgraded" to be closed, you'd have a right to be upset.

You can be upset all you want, but unless it was adverticed as "easily expandable" or whatever then your upset-itness doesn't matter.

I don't know what you are going on about carpets, but to relate it to topic: You are well within your rights to choose the actual lamp in which you use the bulbs.

I don't get why people use such bad examples/metaphores in this topic. Car just is nothing like a light bulb. Another shitty, but little better example would be a gaming consoles. You can't just make a game for new consoles and sell it in stores without going through Microsoft or Sony. Are they within their rights to restrict who can make what kind of games for their consoles? Are they entitled to profit off of each game sold? After all they "just" made the consoles, we buy them, shouldn't we get to choose which games we play and how we obtain them?

> You can't just make a game for new consoles and sell it in stores without going through Microsoft or Sony. Are they within their rights to restrict who can make what kind of games for their consoles?

I think they're well within their rights to say "nobody can brand something as Microsoft or Sony except us", because that protects consumers.

I don't think they should be able to keep you from using the game system that you bought in whatever way you want. That includes reverse engineering it to design games for it or buying such games from someone else. They shouldn't have to guarantee that such games will work, but they shouldn't be able to keep you from trying, either.

Companies are way too quick to disregard consumer rights. You can't decide what to plug into the system we made. You can't decide what coffee pods to use with the coffeemaker we made. You can't decide what bread to cook in the toaster we made.

You know what? Yes I can, because I bought it and it's mine.

But you are just renting the software, which makes the decisions

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