@blenderdumbass > In a way, it seems like the corporations are literally defeating us. They made it so hard for us to fight their nonsense, so hard to reverse engineer their hardware, that most of us gave up. Sitting on 15 - 20 year old machines and pretending to be okay with it. (https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/the_incels_of_computing:_the_depressive_defense_mechanisms_of_free_software)

I think the role that the DMCA and similar bad laws have had in this matter should not be underestimated (https://pluralistic.net/tag/dmca/).

Requiring blackbox reverse-engineering to avoid legal trouble (such as technical felony acts) is *not* a reasonable hurdle and it's why it is so hard to reach feature parity with things that are readily available on Windows.

If those laws were abolished, a lot of things would suddenly become *much* easier to reverse-engineer, because one wouldn't have to shy away from simply decompiling proprietary software to liberate it.