If people want to buy a managed platform that is their choice. No organization with the word 'freedom' in their name should be actively trying to take choices away from consumers. That's just bizarre. It's like arguing StarBucks shouldn't sell me a coffee because it takes away my freedom to make my own coffee at home. Of course it does not. Just because you like to make coffee at home doesn't mean you should be able to force me to do it.
If people want to buy an unmanaged platform, that should also be their choice, but sadly there are almost no options for that, and they all put the user at a severe disadvantage for having made that decision (of course, and to be clear, along axes that have nothing to do with it being unmanaged).
The reason government exists is that sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one). Laws take away people's choices because we consider some choices to be dangerous, whether in the short term (direct damage to others) or in the long term (the relevancy in this context would be our laws against monopolies and trusts).
there are certain things that ought to be user rights, but which there is no financial incentive for any manufacturer to provide (in large part due to the apathy of insufficiently-informed users). for a good parallel, think about things like wheelchair accessibility - it would be very easy for a business to simply write off that minute percentage of its users who are wheelchair bound, but the law has decreed that being accessible to disabled people is a right they want to enforce as a basic cost of doing business.
> No organization with the word 'freedom' in their name should be actively trying to take choices away from consumers.
What organization are you talking about? The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote this article.
On the off chance you're referring to the FSF, the Free Software Foundation wasn't even mentioned in the original article, only in an update about a tangential issue.
