You do realise that's been changing right? Slowly of course, there's no single villain that James Bond could take down, or that a charistmatic leader could get elected could change. The oil tanker has been moving in that direction for decades. There are legions defending the right to run your own software, but it's a continual war of attrition.
The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman.
"Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that."
I've been in tech and startup culture for over a thousand programmer-years (25-30 normal years). It wasn't dot-com or the crash. It was mobile. The mobile ecosystem has always been user-hostile and built around the exploitation of the customer rather than serving the customer. When the huge mobile wave hit (remember "mobile is the future" being repeated the way political pundits repeat talking points?) the entire industry was bent in that direction.
I'm not sure why this is. It could have been designed and planned, or it could have evolved out of the fact that mobile devices were initially forced to be locked down by cell carriers. I remember how hard it was for Blackberry and Apple to get cell carriers to allow any kind of custom software on a user device. They were desperately terrified of being commoditized the way the Internet has commoditized telcos and cable companies. Maybe the ecosystem, by being forced to start out in a locked-down way, evolved to embrace it. This is known as path-dependence in evolution.
Edit: another factor, I think, is that the Internet had no built in payment system. As a result there was a real scramble to find a way to make it work as a business. I've come to believe that if a business doesn't bake in a viable and honest business model from day zero, it will eventually be forced to adopt a sketchy one. All the companies that have most aggressively followed the "build a giant user base, then monetize" formula have turned to total shit.
I remember sites on the early web like Hampster Dance, where monetization happened as an afterthought. But if you have to pay $99 annually and jump through hoops just to get your software even testable on the devices of a large number of consenting users, the vast majority of software is going to be developed by people who seek an ROI on that $99 investment - which wasn't cheap then and isn't cheap now. Hampster Dance doesn't and wouldn't exist as an app, because Hampster Dance isn't made as a business opportunity.
Similarly, outside of a few bright lights like CocoaPods, you don't get an open-source ecosystem for iOS that celebrates people making applications for fun. And Apple doesn't want hobbyist apps on its store, because Apple makes more money when every tap has a chance of being monetized. Killing Flash, too, was part of this strategy.
Apple certainly could have said "developers developers developers" and made its SDK free. But it realized it had an opportunity to change the culture of software in a way where it could profit from having the culture self-select for user-hostility, and it absolutely took that opportunity.
It's not a bad place, the environment we live in. But IMO, if Apple had just made a principled decision years ago to democratize development on its platforms, and embraced this utopian vision of "anyone can become a programmer"... it could have been a much brighter world.
I think a big reason was customers' ignorance. The manufacturers can come up with whatever they want, if no one buys it it does not matter. People accepted locked-down smartphones because they saw them a phones first and foremost. If I recall correctly the iPhone released without any app store, so it was really not that different from a dumb cell phone. If you had offered those same people a desktop PC or laptop that you could not install your own programs on, that had no file explorer, that could barely connect to anything else no one would have bought it. But because they say smart phones as telephones first it flew over their head. How many of the people who are upgrading to Windows 11 now because of lack of security support are still running an outdated smartphone? The phone probably has more sensitive data on it than the PC by now.
People are willing to accept restrictions when they come with newer technology. Why is that? I don't know, I'm just reporting on what I see.
Right. It was infuriating when those of us criticizing the iPhone's restrictions were told "it's just a phone, who cares", when it was clear that mobile computing was going to take over quickly.