Vendor Lock-in Quotes

If something goes wrong with my switch, there's no way anyone from Bharti can do anything about it. An Ericsson guy is going to have to come and fix it. I don't manufacture it; I can't maintain or upgrade it. So I'm thinking, 'This doesn't really belong to me. Let's just throw it out.'

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.

Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can't change it since they don't have the source code. They can't study what it really does. So the proprietary program is a system of unjust power.

Despite outsiders being invited to write software, the iPhone thus remains tightly tethered to its vendor - the way that the Kindle is controlled by Amazon.

We believe that cloud will be based on significant open-source components that are offered as services. People don't want to be locked into a single provider.

I started working on OpenBSD, and many earlier projects, because I have always felt that vendor systems were not designed for quality.

When you are only one vendor, there is a very low rate of innovation. You think the old architecture is just fine, and it can just happily exist for many years.

I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they want to use with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise.

Customers need to be given control of their own data-not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them.

I consider Apple to be very closed. Let's say you have a book business, and you are charging 5 to 7 percent gross margins; you can't exist in an Apple world because they want 30 percent, and they don't care that you only have 7 percent to play with.

Files on iTunes - and thus iPods - are incompatible with everything else. Applications on iPhones may only be sold and uploaded through the iPhone store - giving Apple control over everything people put on to the devices they thought they owned.

You pass a program and get people dependent on it, making it brutal to get rid of. The key is not letting it get started.

The fact that there simply is 5,000 times more sun power than our consumption needs makes me very optimistic. It's a fantastic resource. We have the ingenuity to send man to the moon, so we definitively have the ingenuity to tap the sun's resources…. The biggest challenge [for solar power] is escaping from the economic effects of vendor lock-in where large investments in nuclear and traditional energy sources keep us 'locked-in' to feeding monsters that will bring us down an economic black hole.

There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.

Thanks to iCloud and other services, the choice of a phone or tablet today may lock a consumer into a branded silo, making it hard for him or her to do what Apple long importuned potential customers to do: switch.

Customers get vested in certain paradigms of computing, and those large vendors will try to keep those customers in those paradigms of computing for as long as possible. That's where you basically get the term cash cow.

To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master.