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"certain amount of sacrifice"

Consumers just want to use a device and get on with their lives. These movements such as boycotting Flash & H.264 for WebM or taking VLC off the App Store to protest against Apple benefit no one.

Having said that I'm very grateful to have GNU Linux and GCC around with us today.

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'These movements' have nothing to do with protest. They change the world by providing (or at the very least, opening the door to) better user experiences over the long term. (See: Darwin, LLVM, WebKit.)

The vast majority of criticisms like this one are based on short term concerns related to a given state-of-play in the market. Concerns like the ones that killed Linux stone dead back in the '90s, web standards in the mid-2000s, and *ndroid.

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