Open source means freedom from ‘anti-features’

“Proprietary vendors are using “anti-features”, features that no
user would ever want, to protect intellectual property, Benjamin
“Mako” Hill, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told
the linux.conf.au open source conference last month.

“But IP protection is only one of several reasons vendors
introduce such features into their products.

“An anti-feature serves the interests of the vendor, he says,
not the user. A typical example is the set of limitations placed on
the Home Basic version of Microsoft’s Vista operating system; these
restricted memory and disk-storage support and limited the user to
at most three concurrent applications using the graphical user
interface, Hill says.”

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