Comment by EvanAnderson

I'm afraid the acceptance (and, more troubling, the seeming desire on the part of technical people who I see as misguided) of mobile computers in the smart phone form factor to be locked down and hostile to their owners has moved the Overton window on personal computers being equally owner-hostile. The bucket-of-parts PC ecosystem is less susceptible to an effort to lock down the platform and create walled gardens. If that market goes away it gets easier to turn all of our personal computers into simply computer-shaped devices (like Chromebooks and iPads).

I'm really fearful that PCs are going down the road of locked bootloaders, running the user-facing OSs inside bare-metal hypervisors that "protect" the hardware from the owner, etc.

I'll accept that I'm likely under the influence of a bit of paranoia, too.

I'm strongly of the opinion several unaffiliated factions (oligarchs, cultural authoritarians, "intellectual property" maximalists, software-as-a-service providers, and intelligence agencies, to name a few) see unregulated general purpose computers in the hands of the public as dangerous.

I don't think there's an overt conspiracy to remove computing from the hands of the public. The process is happening because of an unrelated confluence of goals.

I don't see anybody even remotely comparable in lobbying power standing up for owner's rights, either.