It's a bit like cars.<p>Cars used to be 'user servicable', you could take them apart and put them back together again, or repair them with simple tools.<p>The further you integrate something the further away you get from 'user servicable'.<p>Due to emissions controls cars were equipped with injection systems and motor management, and then car manufacturers discovered 'lock-in', how to make money on obfuscation in stead of openness.<p>Computing is doing the exact same thing.<p>Gone are the simple serial and parallel interfaces, and in their place you get undocumented docking connectors and other 'magic'.<p>The only thing that keeps things open to some extent is the fact that the internet arrived <i>just</i> in time to save us from complete lock in hell. The protocols are standardized enough to let devices talk to each other.<p>So that's where you're going to find your new 'openness', at the protocol level.<p>Serverside it will take a long time to go 'closed', but on the client side I would expect to see more and more devices that are closed as much as possible.<p>Gaming hardware has already gone that way, mobile phones started out closed ('to protect the networks', as if client side security would be good enough for a carrier).<p>It's not a good development, but it will happen.<p>Tech savvy people can only push back by releasing their own open devices, the open source variety of hardware.