The repairability of the hardware really has nothing to do with software ownership. You can buy a Dell with soldered in components. Android phones are glued together similarly to an iPhone. There is very clearly an engineering reason for this: old laptops were heavy and bulky. Old phones had tiny batteries and simple functionality while a modern phone is trying to pack in as many features per square mm as possible.
You can run open source software on iOS or macOS. There’s nothing in these operating systems preventing apps from working with local files and having options to export and import data. There’s nothing preventing the author of a web application from doing the same (though it’s hard to see a lot of motivation for someone selling a saas subscription to do so). There are self-hosted open source collaboration tools like NextCloud, OnlyOffice, and Gitlab. The fact that VSCode is web based doesn’t change how it’s open source and completely open to tinkering.
What you’re doing here is confusing business model with technology.
And I think what you’re failing to do is look at this software from the perspective of enterprise customers.
A business isn’t worried about the things a consumer is worried about. They have access to their data ensured through a contract. They have legal assurances that they won’t be left out in the cold.
Software is, essentially, business logic. And often, what’s valuable about software isn’t the code itself, it’s the people who are supporting, patching, and improving that code. To a business, a software purchase often feels a lot more like a consulting contract. Businesses could run on 100% free software, but what they really need is someone else to spend the time working out issues and making it “just work.” They need to waste as little of their employees’ time on cost centers, because labor is the highest cost. Ownership doesn’t matter to a business because the only thing a business needs to own is its own core products and services.
You compared this situation to video games - interestingly enough, on that subject, the majority of game consoles have been 100% locked down for almost 4 decades now. Video games are almost entirely closed source. Modded games are mostly banned from online play. Nobody cares that they can’t open up their Xbox to upgrade/replace the components because it’s simply not a priority. Video Games are essentially media content, art, not business logic.
You can run open source software on iOS or macOS. There’s nothing in these operating systems preventing apps from working with local files and having options to export and import data. There’s nothing preventing the author of a web application from doing the same (though it’s hard to see a lot of motivation for someone selling a saas subscription to do so). There are self-hosted open source collaboration tools like NextCloud, OnlyOffice, and Gitlab. The fact that VSCode is web based doesn’t change how it’s open source and completely open to tinkering.
What you’re doing here is confusing business model with technology.
And I think what you’re failing to do is look at this software from the perspective of enterprise customers.
A business isn’t worried about the things a consumer is worried about. They have access to their data ensured through a contract. They have legal assurances that they won’t be left out in the cold.
Software is, essentially, business logic. And often, what’s valuable about software isn’t the code itself, it’s the people who are supporting, patching, and improving that code. To a business, a software purchase often feels a lot more like a consulting contract. Businesses could run on 100% free software, but what they really need is someone else to spend the time working out issues and making it “just work.” They need to waste as little of their employees’ time on cost centers, because labor is the highest cost. Ownership doesn’t matter to a business because the only thing a business needs to own is its own core products and services.
You compared this situation to video games - interestingly enough, on that subject, the majority of game consoles have been 100% locked down for almost 4 decades now. Video games are almost entirely closed source. Modded games are mostly banned from online play. Nobody cares that they can’t open up their Xbox to upgrade/replace the components because it’s simply not a priority. Video Games are essentially media content, art, not business logic.