@fuzzyfungus wrote:
I took no overall position on the price discrimination as a whole, just noted that its manifestations are overwhelmingly visible and annoying in software, as opposed to other areas, which is what makes the "What if we bring OSS into this?" idea so compelling.
In other markets price discrimination has totally different manifestations, some of which are pretty much irrelevant to software (hardcover books costing more mostly because they release first, not because of production cost, staggering theater and DVD release dates, etc, etc.) and some that are almost the opposite of the camera market: Computers, say, have nearly zero software differentation; but CPUs with capabilities disabled, motherboards with only half the DIMM slots soldered on, and assorted other hardware-based price discrimination techniques are all over the place.
I wasn't really looking for an argument on price discrimination in general, just noting that the way it works with cameras creates a lot of situations where the hardware is pretty amazing but the software is clearly messing with you, which is where being able to modify the software in your interests is most attractive. If the situation had shaken down differently, and camera makers competed brutally on firmware quality, it'd likely be the case that only Richard Stallman would be interested in OSS camera firmware; but the low end would have some other deliberately galling defects and people would be trying to kickstart or 3d print their way out of those.