Maybe someone can help me understanding.
Why is it OK to lock down smartphones, TV devices, consoles, but not OK for PCs?
Why is it OK to lock down smartphones, TV devices, consoles, but not OK for PCs?
It's however particularly unacceptable to lock down what used to be open.
Then tension is that we've almost always been able to install Linux on standard Windows machines and so have gotten used to it being open, but I'd be loathed to say (if the manufacturers have decided to make it tricky deliberately or just not thinking) we have a fundamental right to do it.
But there is a right not to buy this stuff and a right to tell other people not to buy it, too. There is also a right to tell the vendors how much you abhor them for selling such closed products and there is a right to tell journalists or other people why buying closed products is a really bad idea. And you have a right to lobby to make producing/buying closed products socially unacceptable.
Ever since not preventing you also meant not preventing others, and thus malware, exploits, pwnage, stolen data and passwords, etc.
And ever since what you wanted to do was hurting others (e.g. not driving while drunk, even if its your car) or violating other's copyright.
Seems like it's "okay" when you can get away with it. But not okay when large group of people get some slight inconvenience.
If the technology gets convenient and cheap enough, they might not be.
"Most Japanese domestic market vehicles are limited to 180 km/h (112 mph) or 190 km/h (118 mph)." Almost twice the common maximum speed limit (100km/h).
IMHO, it is not OK to lock down things you own. I have been a victim. I bought an AppleTV v2 and a planned obsolescence by Apple and Google rendered it useless (with a YouTube API version requirement).
PCs are special in that, they are general purpose devices and not appliances. If you are using it as an appliance, chances are, you are not interested in running another operating system on it.
E.g. with an unlocked Android device, I will typically at most install a different rom that's largely the same as the stock rom. Various small enhancements but nothing I can't live without.
But a PC that can't run Linux is entirely useless to me.
It isn't - and this is why I don't own a smartphone, smart TV or game console.
Once, just before Blu-ray was a thing, I encountered a "HD DVD" which was a data DVD containing a Windows Media file. This used the embedded DRM licensing system to call home to a server when you played it, and refused to run if your source IP was not in the US.
It was the 3rd party suppliers (i.e. BIOS by companies like Phoenix, Award, AMI along with motherboard manufacturers etc.) selling picks and shovels to the would-be prospectors (i.e. clone assemblers) that allowed for the 'open' PC standard. For example, there was a company call PCs Limited that licensed AMI BIOS so that they make some IBM clones... they did kind of OK and soon renamed themselves Dell...
Some of the other companies I mentioned were the ones that followed Compaq's lead and did their own clean room versions which they then sold to everyone else who came flooding into the market.
As an aside, this was actually a problem for the first few years: take multiple independent clean room implementations, bake in some silly things that the manufacturers did with them (gotta customize, right?), and combine it with the bad programming practices of the day (i.e. programs written in assembly doing jumps into undocumented portions of the BIOS because, hey, it worked on the IBM and saved a few bytes/cycles or did something useful...) It was similar to how well web standards worked not too many years ago with multiple browser implementations doing/interpreting things slightly differently and developers doing things they shouldn't because they could... and that was with a public spec designed to be copied. Eventually things get worked out, but both had a rough start.
Unlike its competitors, Spectrum had standard phone jack connectors for sound and magnetic tape recorder (so you could use any recorder). It also had a direct circuit board connection to the system bus on the back, and the schematics were available. My father built us the 8255 interface to have joystick and other peripherals connected.
And you surely could not overwrite it.
There weren't many useful things in the ROM, if you were writing your application. Maybe the font table and tape loader. On the other hand, if you were able to ignore the ROM, you got few bytes more of RAM, because you were able to repurpose the "system variables" area.
The biggest "problem" with ROM that you were unable to replace it with RAM (until next reset, for example), thus taking precious 16kB out of 64kB address range.
But a monopoly mandating interacting products to lock down is a completely different game.