Am I only one who doesn't see a problem here? Sure it would be nice if company X allowed me to use cheaper Chinese knock-offs with their product, but to me, they are well within their rights to decide: "hey, we don't want competitors to benefit from our product(s)" In essense Phillips put money into R&D and marketing and if you are to believe the linked article into making smart lightbulbs mainstream. That shit is no…
> to me, they are well within their rights to decide: "hey, we don't want competitors to benefit from our product(s)" I'd say: the products cease to be theirs when a someone buys them, and the consumer is the one who benefits from being able to choose competitor's products. Toyota did a lot of work designing my car, but they don't get a monopoly on selling me carpet mats. It's my car and I'll put what I want in there…
I don't know what you are going on about carpets, but to relate it to topic: You are well within your rights to choose the actual lamp in which you use the bulbs.
I don't get why people use such bad examples/metaphores in this topic. Car just is nothing like a light bulb. Another shitty, but little better example would be a gaming consoles. You can't just make a game for new consoles and sell it in stores without going through Microsoft or Sony. Are they within their rights to restrict who can make what kind of games for their consoles? Are they entitled to profit off of each game sold? After all they "just" made the consoles, we buy them, shouldn't we get to choose which games we play and how we obtain them?