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Ah, that is why the community tries so hard to break hardware and reverse engineer devices...



This seems like a total non-sequitur, unless there’s a link I don’t see?

The people try really hard to get working the systems they are interested in, and then share their results. I mean there are various wikis out there with big lists of printers and wifi dongles (thankfully less of a thing nowadays) that are listed in states of:

* I actually could try this on my side and it works

* This brand usually has drivers, good luck!

* Totally unusable.

Imagine if a company with a customer service relationship, like Microsoft, went around dropping support for reasonably recent hardware! It would be seen as a sure sign that they’d betrayed their customers and dropped all pretense of competence. But the expectations for a community project are happily different.




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