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Maybe someone can help me understanding. Why is it OK to lock down smartphones, TV devices, consoles, but not OK for PCs?
by dewiz 10y ago
Maybe someone can help me understanding.
Why is it OK to lock down smartphones, TV devices, consoles, but not OK for PCs?
- smegel 10y agoThey aren't "devices" yet.
- pavelludiq 10y agoIt's NOT OK to lock down smartphones, TV devices, consoles, cars, etc.
- madaxe_again 10y agoSomething like tradition. The IBM PC has been an "open" system since the late 70's. Tablets etc (palmtops!) started appearing in the 90's, and were walled gardens from the get go.
- ricksplat 10y agoThat was the whole thing about PCs - if my memory of Cringley's "Triumph of the Nerds" serves, the genesis of this category was IBM rushing to a market where other "closed" vendors such as Apple were already established. It wasn't that PCs were open "by design" but more that they did things quickly and gathered other vendors "off the shelf" notably Microsoft and Intel, and had a copyrighted "BIOS" holding the whole thing together. Once Compaq reverse engineered this BIOS (through some legally clean techniques) the market was blown open to the clone manufacturers and Intel and MS were happy to play along since at the end of the day they were just shipping more units .... probably couldn't do it these days due to DMCA and other modern copyright legislation in other jurisdictions.
- ptaipale 10y agoAnd what Compaq did was possible because at that time you couldn't copyright the BIOS API. Today it might be different, to the loss of everyone.
- ricksplat 10y agoWe're still waiting to hear what's acceptable in terms of "fair use" but yeah I guess reverse-engineering to create a competing clone probably wouldn't be covered :)
- pjmlp 10y agoIBM PC was made open by Compaq in 1981 not late 70's, IBM would rather had it closed as the Commodore, Spectrum, Atari, Amiga, Acorn, Mac were.
- blihp 10y agoYou're both wrong. The IBM PC was made by IBM in 1981 and it was absolutely not open. (Just hurriedly implemented using commodity parts so, other than the BIOS, it was pretty easy and legal to copy most of it) Then Compaq came along in 1982 and sold a clone of it... and in some ways it was even less open than the IBM. Neither one of those companies had any interest in the PC being 'open'. 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...
- pjmlp 10y agoWould it have happened if Compaq hadn't done a clean room reverse engineering?
- blihp 10y agoI think so. Compaq just proved that it could be done without being bankrupted by an IBM lawsuit. IBM was the 800lb gorilla like Microsoft was in the 90's or Apple/Google are today. Being sued into oblivion was the real fear, not that it was technically a difficult job. 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.
- wazoox 10y agoWhen was it okay to prevent me to do what I want to something I own ? Absolutely never ever. Region locking of DVDs, DRMs of all sorts, smartphones locking are plain, shameless abuse. It's however particularly unacceptable to lock down what used to be open.
- wastedhours 10y agoIs worth saying that for most things, you buy them in the state they're in - there's no "right" to openness, as much as we might want it. Just because you own a house, doesn't mean you can just put a 6 storey extension in the garden. 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.
- wolfgke 10y ago> there's no "right" to openness 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.
- wastedhours 10y agoExactly. If you want openness then tell the manufacturers you want openness and people can put their money where their mouths are, however, I still don't believe expecting it as default when exceptionally few people (relatively speaking) ever have or will, is an entirely rational thought process.
- coldtea 10y ago>When was it okay to prevent me to do what I want to something I own? 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.
- Piskvorrr 10y agoIt is not OK in any of those cases. The widespread practice just makes it easy to rationalize "but we are not the only vendor who does this."
- nvarsj 10y agoIt's part of the PC culture, and the Thinkpad/Lenovo heritage as ideal Linux laptops. But you're right, it's no different from what Apple/LG/Samsung/etc. do.
- akerro 10y agoTVs, mobile phones and consoles didn't start their journeys are portable and free to modify devices as PCs did.
- pjmlp 10y agoNeither did home computers (Personal Computers), only the IBM PC clones did thanks to Compaq and their reverse engineering process not being invalidated in court.
- scholia 10y agoWell, the IBM PC followed a generation of 8-bit CP/M microcomputers that were pretty much open.... though they were mainly used by businesses rather than home users.
- akerro 10y agoI see the confusion now, by free to modify I meant you can go and replace your operating system, bootloader or hardware. Do you need more RAM, just get some and put it into your MOBO, third screen? Just get it and plug-in. Recently I replcated screen in my laptop to a matt one, keyboard one with harder keys and it all works. When I want to change screen in my phone, I can't only one certain model will work as expected, some models might fix, but they won't support the same resolution, can't upgrade camera or RAM there, so basically, it's not my hardware, I have to use what manufacturer pre-selected for me.
- venomsnake 10y agoIt is not ok to lock down devices. And I do hope for a lawsuit that will reaffirm the owners' right of a unlocked boot loader.
- vidarh 10y agoIt's not ok, but the way most of us use our devices makes it less ok for PCs because we have far more reason to insist on our own software there. 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.
- pjc50 10y agoI hope I never have to deal with a locked down TV. Region-locked DVDs are bad enough. 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.
- wolfgke 10y ago> Why is it OK to lock down smartphones, TV devices, consoles It isn't - and this is why I don't own a smartphone, smart TV or game console.
- jonathanstrange 10y agoWell, here is you answer: It's not okay to lock down anything.
- PieterH 10y agoAbuse of monopoly power.
- vu3rdd 10y ago> Why is it OK to lock down smartphones, TV devices, consoles, but not OK for PCs? 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.
- marcosdumay 10y agoNone of those are ok. But a monopoly mandating interacting products to lock down is a completely different game.