We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

I worked on a product where we tried to keep it open for end users to modify what they wanted.

To be honest, it was way more of a problem than I ever imagined. The average user who tries to mod their system isn’t as proficient as you imagine they would be. As an engineer you imagine other engineers approaching the system as you would. In practice, it’s a lot of people with a lot of free time who copy and paste things into terminal sessions from forum posts and YouTube video comments. When it doesn’t work, they try to get your customer support team to fix it. They will deny, deny, deny when asked if they’ve modified the system because they want to trick support into debugging it anyway. When customer support refuses to handle their modified system, they try to RMA or return it for a refund in protest.

Over time, it drains you. You see the customer support request statistics and realize that a massive support burden could be avoided by locking it down. You see the RMA analysis and realize a lot of perfectly good devices are being returned with weird hacks applied. Every time you change an API or improve the system you have to deal with a vocal minority of angry modders who don’t want you to change anything, ever, because they expect the latest updates to work perfectly with all of their customer software.

It’s tiresome. I think the only way this works is if customers have to log in to a system and agree to surrender all customer support and warranty service for a device to enable the free-for-all mode for them. That doesn’t work, though, because warranty laws require that you service the device regardless unless you can prove it was the modification that caused the RMA, which is a model that works with vehicle service but not the $100 consumer hardware device.

So I get. I wish every device could be totally open, but doing that with normal customer service and support is a huge burden. The only place it really works is devices like Raspberry Pi where it’s sold as something where you’re on your own, not something where customer support agents have to deal with what the product was supposed to do before all of the different mods were applied.