| What cost? Competition? That isn't definite. Support overhead? I don't buy it. > If you are easily able to change the firmware, you are easily able to destroy the hardware, and if that's under warranty, companies are going to be concerned. ...so void the warrantee when flashing 3rd-party firmware. How often, in reality, are people going to fry their hardware? It's not as if 99.99999% of 3rd-party firmware users are writing that firmware themselves! Hardware damage should be expected as an extreme edge case, not a broad looming risk. --- If we are going to put this much effort into speculating cost, we should put equal effort into speculating value. Open firmware is significantly likely to reduce the costs of compatibility and edge-case support. It is also likely to increase the value of the product by making it auditable and maintainable. It also factors out the cost of anti-user-maintenance efforts like DRM. Most importantly, open firmware can stabilize the value of a product, increasing its resale price and delaying price decline. Unfortunately, this is the point that many companies consider negative, because they don't want to compete with themselves. |