Your analogy seems pretty inflammatory and greatly exaggerated.
I certainly sympathize with the practical constraints involved in, e.g. not using Windows or macOS, but there are practical alternatives available, many of them free, and operating systems, or even software more generally, are very recent economic goods and thus, to me, it seems pretty understandable why there aren’t ‘perfect’ conventions/rules/regulations regarding how they should work.
And, if anything, some of the existing ‘folk’ conventions, e.g. that a company/organization that provides an operating system ‘should’ continue to support it indefinitely, makes your analogy (or a more sensible version of it) a lot more reasonable.
I get that the relevant tradeoffs feel painful to navigate, but you seem to be claiming that they’re so onerous that they’re effectively coercive, and I think it’s important to point out that that’s not true.
Your analogy seems pretty inflammatory and greatly exaggerated.
I certainly sympathize with the practical constraints involved in, e.g. not using Windows or macOS, but there are practical alternatives available, many of them free, and operating systems, or even software more generally, are very recent economic goods and thus, to me, it seems pretty understandable why there aren’t ‘perfect’ conventions/rules/regulations regarding how they should work.
And, if anything, some of the existing ‘folk’ conventions, e.g. that a company/organization that provides an operating system ‘should’ continue to support it indefinitely, makes your analogy (or a more sensible version of it) a lot more reasonable.
I get that the relevant tradeoffs feel painful to navigate, but you seem to be claiming that they’re so onerous that they’re effectively coercive, and I think it’s important to point out that that’s not true.