[tux1968]

> IMO the way this should work is that Google can make their software however they want provided they don't do anything to stop me from changing it to work the way I want.

That's exactly how it is. You're free to get your soldering iron out, or your debugger and reverse engineer anything you want. I don't mean to argue unfairly, but all we're talking about here is the relative ease with which you can do what you want to do. How easy do they have to make it?

As for their software, as delivered, there are literally an infinite number of ways that it stops you from changing it. Maybe you want everything in Pig Latin, or a language you made up yourself. Do they have to design around this desire? Do they have to make this easy to do?

[Ajedi32]

I don't necessarily think they should have to design anything to make it easier, just not actively design things to make it harder.

[Ajedi32]

Though actually... I've recently become more sympathetic to the idea that software developers should be forced to take active steps to make software they distribute easy for users to modify, because software is both essential to modern life, and uniquely able to act against consumer interests in a way that's almost completely unprecedented for other goods in all human history.

A couple decades ago it would have been impractical if not impossible to make a TV, sell it to a bunch of people, and then remotely update it a few years later to start showing unkippable manufacturer-installed video ads every time you power it on. Or create a car that requires you to pay money to the manufacturer every month in order to use the seat heaters. Or build a tractor that detects if you repair it using parts not made by a specific manufacturer and shuts itself off if you do.

But now, in the age of software, all of these abuses are not only feasible to implement, but easy. And it all comes down to the fact that the software that controls these devices cannot be easily modified by the user who purchased them, or by anyone other than the company that originally manufactured them. It's a local monopoly. Were software developers required to distribute the source and build tools along with the compiled code, I suspect a vibrant modding community would spring up around any product of sufficient popularity which would make such abuses much more difficult to get away with. (Why pay a monthly subscription for my seat heaters when I can just buy a $5 software mod that permanently enables them? And why bother developing such an anti-feature in the first place if you know users will easily bypass it?)