Jacob

@leeloo @lianna @StaticR and the operating system that comes installed, is this part of the phone? you own this series of bits and have the right to do whatever you want with them now?

@leeloo @lianna @StaticR uh, actually the correct analogy would be licensing a franchise of a McDonald’s in a building that you own, and then breaking the rules of that franchise agreement by selling or eating food outside the dining standards. don’t license the franchise, i.e., don’t run software you don’t agree with, even if you need it for technical reasons.

@lianna @leeloo @StaticR it’s not, though. just in the sense that you do not own the order of the words of a book you purchase, you do not own the cleverness of the OS. you own the ink the renders the words, and you own the electrons that represent a copy of that cleverness. The cleverness is licensed to you, not sold.

@jakobtougaard @StaticR @lianna @leeloo so you’re saying in this case, the manufacturer is trying to build in a physical safety measure that stigmatizes “side-sales” that occur outside ATF-sanctioned sellers, and we would… scorn this?

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org @leeloo@chaosfem.tw @lianna@micro.webgarden.click well EULAs vary, but sideloading covers a number of security and piracy concerns. the hobbyist days of computing where collaborative behavior was required simply for the end-user experience to exist are over. this doesn’t make competitive behavior illegal or immoral, it makes you overly nostalgic.

@StaticR @lianna @leeloo yet if a sideloaded application is used as an attack vector it is the OS brand who suffers an image crisis 🤔

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org @leeloo@chaosfem.tw @lianna@micro.webgarden.click if the terms are so onerous and unfair to the customer base, there must be a huge market for a provider without them to overtake with their own device and software. isn’t that how the free market works?

@StaticR @leeloo @lianna in a vacuum, you are technically correct. there is no difference. in reality, George Hotz was able to enable an entire generation of people to sideload things onto their PS3s and iPhones *as a literal child*. somehow I think if he was into engines there would have been less widespread IP violation. I can’t put my finger on why, but maybe you can help?

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org you could then install any OS made by someone or some organization that’s okay with their intellectual property being applied to any device, or just write your own.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org @leeloo@chaosfem.tw @lianna@micro.webgarden.click of course it is. it’s about what a small developer can provide to those users with complete agency, who only have such agency because they were given it by monolith corp.

@leeloo @StaticR @lianna again, take the example of George Hotz, who in high school back in 2007 “siMply waNTEd TO modifY SoFtWARe thaT He ownED On hIS IPhonE” and then oops! somehow a multi-billion exclusivity deal that AT&T paid for with real money lost tons of value. yea boo hoo, I get it. nothing of real value lost.

@leeloo @lianna @StaticR yes, but I did not buy any of the patents or cleverness that make it work. if I want to make changes to the engine, I am depending on such cleverness to do so, not just the physical presence of the object I purchased.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org it also has a battery and no fan

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org a truly *free* market also enables *me* to build devices, systems and applications that allow *me* to restrict *you* from doing any of these things with the devices, systems and applications I build, and whichever has the greater competitive advantage as a result, will be more successful.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org people have just as many rights as they used to, they’re just choosing not to write as many bootloaders and kernels as they used to. it’s a choice, nobody is restricting them.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org just put TempleOS on it, write a driver for the modem and phone application in HolySee, and you are *nobody’s bitch*

@leeloo @StaticR @lianna that’s weird, cause you can completely replace it with all new software without physically modifying the phone at all. software is just someone’s interpretation of the best way to arrange electrons in a way that represents your intentions. it’s intellectual property, not physical, and is subject to different ownership rules.

@StaticR @lianna @leeloo an agreement is an agreement. you make one when you use software. you can opt to violate it if you like, but that doesn’t mean you get to unilaterally set the terms of its use.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org @leeloo@chaosfem.tw @lianna@micro.webgarden.click 95% of these companies exist because some autistic nerds felt the *exact same way* about something a few decades ago. so they built something from scratch. it’s “fair” because you don’t have time to reinvent the wheel like they did, and they don’t think you should get rights to tinker with their wheel as if you did. it would make them easier to topple over, using their own creation against them.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org the moral of the story is that if you want the public to care about their rights, they need to be more of a gift than a burden

@leeloo @StaticR @lianna you don’t need to use that software to use the phone though, the EULA has nothing to do with the *phone*. you accept terms to use *software*. if you disagree, you’re more than capable of just pulling a Terry Davis and writing your own bootloader, kernel, OS, etc. in order to utilize that hardware you now own if you disagree with those terms the software creators set.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org you can then install any application on that system so long as the developer has made their source code available, and licensed it with terms agreeable for doing so.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org that doesn’t sound like a smartphone. that sounds like a Nokia 3310.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org @leeloo@chaosfem.tw @lianna@micro.webgarden.click make your own slingshot, David. don’t be all butthurt the ones for sale say: “Cannot be used to kill Goliath, f.k.a. David”

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org you can absolutely build a device out of parts of your choosing or have a vendor do it, you just don’t find it convenient.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org it weighs 567g, which is less than the heaviest smartphone available today (the Armor 33 Pro at 785g)

@leeloo @StaticR @lianna if this were the wizarding world of Harry Potter it would literally be the department in the Ministry that comes up with new spells, and you’re trying to act like it’s just any other text or words in that universe.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org @leeloo@chaosfem.tw @lianna@micro.webgarden.click so? if what they’re providing is of so little value as to not merit the leverage they are wielding, surely you can just provide yourself? or maybe what they’re providing is valuable, complex, and difficult enough to produce in this day and age that only a massive monolith can? how is that their problem?

@lianna @leeloo @StaticR but yea generally speaking, reproduction of a patent’s cleverness without paying royalties *is indeed theft* — don’t get mad at me for the status quo.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org I mean, just take a fanless industrial PC with a built-in cellular modem, like one of these https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2-Lan-6-COM-IOT-Industrial_1601444279616.html

@leeloo @StaticR @lianna but don’t try to naively defend software modification like it’s “writing in the margins of a novel” or “updating my engine timing”, because it’s *just not*. the scale of ramifications gives real merit to the basis for special legal consideration.

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org @leeloo@chaosfem.tw @lianna@micro.webgarden.click or maybe most customers are actually happy to have an App Store because 20 years ago they kept getting viruses from clicking the wrong button on download.com because they didn’t understand what SourceForge was

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org here’s one with a touchscreen, battery and LTE modem included: https://higolepcstore.com/products/f9b-7inch-mini-pc?variant=50891270979877