Corporate theft has left us in a bad place Welcome to the new Proprietary earth!! BOOOOO

[keeperofthestones01]

The last 20 years has been wasted on in house proprietary software (that is usually Crqp), rehashing old ideas endlessly in pursuit of greater profits, corporations are working flat out to make extinct any home enthusiast who might wish to GOD FORGIVE use their software or hardware outside of the illegal agreement known as a EULA.. or to tinker or to alter or to improve..so we only get what we are given by corporations...this is very bad for the economics and progression of usefull but not profitable technology and software development....BOO on the corporate thieves in suits. Thoughts on how to revive home enthusiasts and tech interested remaining interested in fiddling with proprietary hardware and software as real improvement will not come from corporations only that which lines their pockets. Bring back Free !!! Help with comments on how we can make freeware relevant again....? please

 

[USAFRet]

Here ya go:
https://www.linux.org/
https://www.arduino.cc/
https://www.raspberrypi.org/

 

[HyperPete]

Along the same lines:

DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

News and feature lists of Linux and BSD distributions.

www.distrowatch.com

 

[Uberwolf]

I agree but am coming to this issue from a different prespective. I get what is bugging keeperofthestones. I remenber DOS, OS/2DOS on up to Win 95/98 and even up to Win XP. Somebody who was not a programmer could still enjoy learning about the insides of the operating system and make changes and tailor the O/S to suite their needs and wants. Sure it was not rocket science and the O/S was not changed in any significient way but it at least gave the user a feeling of control over their system. XP was a great os for tinkering and changing the way your particular system acted and there were some great discussions on the various forums where one could learn about the various editing and altering of the os. Back then Windows users used to laugh at Mac users and how their os was in the total control of Apple. Now while Vista was a pos imo it was the beginning of the control MS wanted to excercise over Windows. Even Win 7 was not totally wrapped up tight, one could tinker and alter quite a bit although I thi k it was the start of restrictions on how many times you could a fresh install of the O/S or if you changed any of your hardware your Win 7 disk might be useless to you, this was about money rather than control. Win 8 was not as user freindly and Win 10 might as well be ios. With Win 10 MS want to control even aspects of the system that should be the customers choice, like Windows Update, by default there is no way to turn off updates totally, the same with others aspects of Win 10, you cannot alter, change or turn off many of the systems aspects. The bottom line while MS will sell you the O/S they want to control how the customer uses it, I am not talking about piracy here but the end user enjoying their system and tinkering with it to suit their own needs. While linux is brillant it's not for everyone and can be quite challanging for a user to get to grips with.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Linux is about as open source as it can get. Realistically there is some eula free software today, but it lacks cross compatability with the proprietary software we all know and love.
Office software: open office freeware
Os: any flavor of linux
Hardware: raspberry pi good project boards that run linux.
Arduinos are also good for project boards.