> You say "It's rude to not play by our rules". They say "It's rude of > you to expect us to change our business model to support your niche > market differently from the way we support everyone else." Neither is > wrong...
Honestly, I think it *is* wrong to sell someone a physical product and then not tell them how to make it work. If you're not actually selling them the physical product but selling them a way to get a particular thing done, then don't represent that you're selling them physical product because that would presumably include the right to use it any way they wanted provided it was lawful. How would you feel if you bought a car and then discovered that the manufacturer had welded the hood shut? How many people still do their own oil changes anyway? If you sell a physical product, you should also include the information necessary to make that physical product *work*. If you don't, you aren't actually selling the physical product, that is, the person is buying a right to use that physical product some particular way and not the product itself. The law may come around on this issue. It has definitely done so on companies that claim to be selling you cellphones but then later claim that you need to pay them additional money if you want the access code to unlock it and make it work with another carrier. If you own a physical phone, it should come with the right to use it with any carrier it can be made to work with, and a company with no ownership interest in the phone has no right to withhold the information needed to make it do that so as to force you to use their service. The same applies when you buy a graphics card and don't want to use it with the manufacturer's drivers. If it's *your* graphics card, the manufacturer has no legitimate interest in forcing you to use their drivers by withholding information about what *you* bought. DS - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
