I mean, how dare they try to make some money, right?
- reduce engineering costs by adding telemetry to make all your customers debug for you.
- conveniently save all telemetry forever, just in case you can sell it for money.
- pop-up advertising. I think those videos that play at the gas station would look good on the bootup screen. If the bootup is too short, then lock the desktop until it is finished.
- take away features, then sell them back as upgrades. adjustable volume? $5
- fortune command interstitials
- busy-loot-box
I don't think oracle equity will match my monetization, but maybe I can partner with them for an ogrep idea I've been mulling over.
I have an original librem 13. It is quite refreshing. No proprietary drivers, works with every linux distribution without fiddling (I run arch). wifi/bt+mic/camera switches. Barrel jack for power. standard screws, standard memory, standard m.2, standard ssd.
Especially with hardware the definition of “freedom” is rather nonsensical such as that by the F.S.F.'s definition, which many follow, destroying a microcontroller such that r.w.-memory becomes r.o. can actually make hardware change from not-free into free. — removing functionality from the user to replace proprietary software with free software makes it freer based on the F.S.F's definition that read-only memory is not software, but hardware.
It's about equal rights. For instance, if the manufacturer can provide security updates, but you can't, they can notify the NSA about security holes first before providing the update. Whereas if it is r.w. for all, anyone can provide security updates.
In fact, a literal reading of the F.S.F.'s definition would make a computer with Windows on it, provided that it be burned into r.o. memory meet the terms of their Respects Your Freedom mark, though perhaps they would refuse in that case due to a clear violation of the spirit of the rules.
The problem is that by the F.S.F.'s definition, one can sidestep it all by simply burning any proprietary software into r.o.m., as then it is hardware, not software.
This paradox is the result of the F.S.F.'s insistence that the world can be neatly partitioned binarily into products that are entirely composed of “free software” and those that are not, and a want of such a binary partition often creates such bizarre paradoxes.
There is no such insistence by the FSF. They simply chose such boundary for giving their certification. It does not mean we should not go further than that, and FSF would of course encourage you to make even more freedom-respecting hardware.
If FSF would demand absolutely free hardware, there would be no devices to certify.
Rather, the F.S.F. should offer a description of checkboxes on devices of which important things they do and do not do, allowing users to easily select the devices with the checkboxes they value.
Arguably if Alexa's AI was burned onto a ROM, you could argue the entire Alexa speaker was a hardware appliance.
The alternative is requiring a microwave's control software to be fully free.
My current computer is a Lenovo X200s bought new. So that’s basically the baseline for my expectation of longevity for a linux daily driver
The cost of creating a new design from scratch is enormous. It is understandable that small company would like to recover it, but also apply a margin high enough to have funds to work on future models.
Don't forget that the cheap laptops also have factored in your data in their price (e.g. they come with malware and other software that assumes you will sign up and give up your privacy) - the GDPR largely applies only to websites and native applications don't seem to have the same T&C regarding privacy.