I am not renting the privilege of using my computer from Intel; I purchased a piece of hardware they happen to produce. I own it now, and I shouldn't have to ma

I am not renting the privilege of using my computer from Intel; I purchased a piece of hardware they happen to produce. I own it now, and I shouldn't have to maintain a relationship with Intel any more than I should have to continue paying fees to Honda for the car I own outright. Corporations are renting the privilege of using Exchange from Microsoft because they want a corporation to stand behind their email system. If they didn't want to maintain a relationship with a major corporation, they could just as easily have done it with open-source software. Cisco is entitled to sell me more sophisticated software, but not to prevent me outright from using the hardware I bought the way I want to with my own software. And they don't. My company wants features that would be too expensive with a unified Cisco solution, so we run Cisco phones flashed with custom open-source firmware connected to a Trixbox.