Could there be a law to protect the free choice of operating system?

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos]

On 03/05/2013 12:47 AM, Vicen Rodriguez wrote:


>> While I sympathise, reality is exactly the other way round. The
>> profit, the companies and the holy "marketplace" are the most
>> important things out there.
> Maybe companies and marketplace seem to be considered sometimes most
> important than citizens' freedom and rights. We should work to fix that,
> at least regarding software. 


Hello,
 It is not about companies and marketplace. It is about consumers who
consider options that provide a good balance between quality and price
of the products they buy. Freedom to modify the product may be
considered by some, but still it is within some balance.

For example would you pay 100.000 euros for a car where you can replace
engine, lights, seats, cpu, software etc, or would you buy a 15000 mass
produced one? The example is exaggerated, but consider that even smaller
price differences, make a lot of impact to certain people.

So in almost every example I can think of, if companies are forced with
legislation to break their products in multiple separate parts, prices
would go up in the average case, and go down in few (geeky) cases. Do
you really believe the average person is prepared to pay more for
something that has not any immediate impact visible to him (not everyone
is a mechanic or software developer). Most probably he'd just import his
product from a country where they don't have those laws.

For these reasons, I find the approach described by Alessandro (which
was unknown to me before) quite interesting to pursue.

regards,
Nikos