> the most productive era of the PC was also when it was the most open The openness certainly was great but it's not actually required. People can figure out h

> the most productive era of the PC was also when it was the most open The openness certainly was great but it's not actually required. People can figure out how to work with closed systems. Adversarial interoperability was common. People would reverse engineer things and make the software work whether or not the manufacturer wanted it. It's the software and hardware locks that used to be rare and are now common. Cryptography was supposed to be something that would empower us but it ended up being used against us to lock us out of our own machines. We're no longer in the driver's seat. Our operating systems don't even operate the system anymore. Our free Linux systems are just the "user OS" in the manufacturer's unknowable amalgamation of silicon running proprietary firmware, just a little component to be sandboxed away from the real action.