> What if your phone uses proprietary software? As has been said, if the software is utterly hardware-specific firmware, such as the software that runs inside

> What if your phone uses proprietary software? As has been said, if the software is utterly hardware-specific firmware, such as the software that runs inside a hard drive that handles bad blocks and head movement and so on, he's OK with it being proprietary. A phone which somehow had software of that sort (to run an integrated answering machine?) would presumably be OK with him as well.