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Boycotting a company?

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19 pointsguelo10 comments

I bought a Sony Playstation 3, which could run Linux with Sony's blessing.

Sony later decided not only to discontinue the Linux support in newer models, but to retroactively disable the capability to run Linux on old-model consoles in the wild with a software update that was included with, and required to play, all disc games released after a certain date, and also required for online play.

As a result of these decisions by Sony, I have not bought any Playstation 3 games, or any Sony product, since then. Sony and its developers have lost out on hundreds of my dollars over the past few years. I will completely stay away from Sony in the next console generation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otheros

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886509

I've been boycotting US-based Dairy Queen restaurants for the last 15 years because my order got screwed up once.

Boycotting the specific product (the new Nexus 7) and buying more open alternatives seems like a much better plan (even if that still probably won't achieve much).

The alternatives are Mediatek and Rockchip, and the community-at-large has an odd definition if they're considered open.

Alternatively, purchase the original Nexus 7 that still has the factory images and proprietary binaries posted for Android 4.3 and before. It still runs great (current owner) and the differences between the new one and the previous are not dramatic outside of the screen resolution.

So... was anyone surprised by the opinion expressed? Did you bother to see where this was posted?

More relevantly, what is this in reaction to?

JBQ, the OP, decided to stop distributing AOSP builds because of the legal troubles getting the proprietary binary blobs needed for builds. Many people interpreted it as an action by Google against the open source community and have proclaimed that they're going to boycott Google.

Ah! I didn't connect this to the AOSP stuff (I didn't follow names in that). Thanks!

FYI, last names are useful.

Sorry I should be more polite. Fuck heads.

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