3 ms·

There's everything wrong with selling hardware that cannot work for its intended purpose without additional proprietary, for-profit software. Would you buy a c

There's everything wrong with selling hardware that cannot work for its intended purpose without additional proprietary, for-profit software. Would you buy a car if you had to pay again to receive a steering wheel, a transmission, or a key? No. Or to take an analogy closer to home, NVIDIA and ATI both sell graphics cards. They also both distribute proprietary device drivers as binary blobs. They do not charge money for the binary blobs on top of what they already charged for the card itself. Nobody has to give anything away for free, but charging twice to use one piece of hardware for its intended purpose oughtn't be allowed.

adrusi 10y ago
There's two parts to Bluray: the storage medium and the specification for the data on the storage medium. You can burn and read bluray disks with a filesystem, and presumably you could use your bluray reader with those kinds of disks. People who don't want to use their bluray reader to watch DRM-encumbered media don't want to pay for a licensed device.
794CD01 10y ago
It is not the responsibility of the hardware seller to know what your intended purpose is. To continue on your graphic card example, perhaps I want to buy them to use in my custom bitcoin mining operation, for which I have created my own more firmware that provides greater efficiency. I would then appreciate not being forced to pay extra for general-purpose graphics software I do not need.