By going this route, they almost certainly make more money.

Hacker news users are not normal users.

Those ordinary people, who may not realize it even, depend on us to push back hard.

Nobody else will. Few are qualified even.

It is strange to be living in a time where law, government is so damn unaware and apparently, uncaring about these things.

Many of us really smart geeks thinks Stallman is the way. If we can't see the source code of every single thing we have, we don't have it. Free or die!

Many others of us think that it's more important privacy is respected. Smooth user experiences are more important than perfect freedom of code. So Apple is the way. You may not know the code on your device, but at least it isn't being sold to the world.

And still others think the Google/Facebook way is right. They provide great services to users! Yes they make money selling private data, but their free tools are invaluable to our life.

With such a divided view among the "tech elite", how could we really stop anything?

Agree that federal law is really the only hope for this kind of stuff, but that is rather hard to do for many reasons.

This is not about "the one, right way" at all.

It is all about what makes good sense for humans and that it continues over a longer period of time.

And many of these things are not exclusive.

Smooth does not have to mean closed.

Free with ADS does not have to also mean no privacy.

Etc...

Open, in the Stallman sense, is not always important. Open data vs open code, and machines, who owns, what is actually a rental, etc... can be resolved to something more livable without being draconian, or useless.

The nice thing about tech is that it's possible for us to push back by hacking on stuff and opening it up rather than resorting to legislative tools, and this can have the same effect of forcing those manufacturers hand but without the artificiality of law.

Tons of us won't like it. And when we don't, we can also point to why we just can't have nice things.

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

Whether you believe that should be our economic system is another matter altogether.

And it is not "the" right model, just a possible and I would argue short sighted one.

What they did was model up a rental business and seeded it as if it were an ownership type one.

That is predatory, depending on what experience level people are buying. They run a very real risk of not understanding what they are buying.

And that, along with better ways to value externalities, would render that model higher cost and risk, as it should be.

Anyone with sufficient experience sees those costs, risks and also sees them as external to the enterprise, and that it all comes at their own expense.

That expense renders the value proposition far less compelling.

Exactly why this bait and switch happened too.

Just because it is legal, does not make it right or ethical.

Given the rise in these trends, yeah. Time to revisit what is legal.

Until enough people are willing to adopt a different value system, we're stuck with this.

It's hard to compete against this. If you try to sell hardware at an honest cost, you'll likely be the more expensive option (or you can price-match but you'll have to reduce your quality) and the vast majority of consumer decision making is driven by the immediate price tag.

It's even worse if you're in the venture-funded world. Money is cheap and you're rewarded in the short run by how many "customers" you have, not whether they can be turned into customers whe pay you more than it costs to acquire them.

For example, Cricut probably has a very strong interest in not opening up their devices, because, while they're the most popular consumer device in this space right now, they don't have much of a natural moat. Keeping things closed makes it harder for current users to switch, which, in turn makes it harder for a competitor to compete. Even if they have a technically superior product. This artificial moat is probably much more valuable to them than the lost profits from being less attractive to people who are into both scrapbooking and Hacker News.