[censored]

It's a battle that has not been won. Make no mistake - the major powers in this arena are in favor of not only proprietary software, but also of proprietary hardware. A completely closed, neat little locked down system, wherein they control all aspects of the computing environment - end to end - is what most see as the holy grail. They're working on it. Dedicatedly.

Do you know what software is running your cell phone? Probably not. You may think you know what's running on your cell phone. Regardless of the operating system your cellphone/smartphone purports to use, it is running (in most cases I'm aware of) on top of a hypervisor which simultaneously runs a second RTOS operating system for phone specific processing. You probably don't have the source code for either of those items (hypervisor or RTOS). Those items, running at the lowest level, or at a higher level with priviledge, can do *anything*. Such an idea is not comforting for me.

In the old days, your PC was very transparent. You could run all of the software, and be assured that you could look at all of that software (given it was open sourced). The trend is to close this off. I think it's for the obvious reasons...

Mobile devices are replacing PCs. Mobile is convenient, it's true, but it's disconcerting. We lose the kind of control we had with the old machinery when we switch to mobile. That loss is in concert with the trend to close off the workings of the hardware we use to execute "PC functionality" in the new era. We suffer a loss of control at a critical level, and simultaneously a loss of who controls "our" systems. Perhaps it's the latter loss that is the most distressful...