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Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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