alt Hacker NewsThat's an oddly legalistic line to draw. What if they start licensing the hardware too? Surely if we care about users being respected by technology, the line between software and hardware or between ownership and licensing is immaterial. These are all excuses to deny users the opportunity to do things they should be entitled to do, like installing arbitrary applications.
Well, the line is drawn by the fact that hardware and software have intrinsic differences. It sounds like we're on the same page about hardware -- with the software, should we not be bound by licenses in client/server services (phones, consoles)? You are using someone else's service with others, for some collective benefit like playing a game, and being bound to constraints on that software doesn't seem that offensive. Modified clients can piss in the pool for others using the services and affect the network's quality.
Again, if you want to run purely OSS software with permissive licenses, that should be your prerogative. But you might miss out on the Play store. If you want to mess with Valve anti-cheat, you can't connect to Steam games online. Etc. I think these companies do have a right to dictate software requirements for client code accessing their servers.
But, you should be able to wipe those clients if you don't care about them and play tux racer on Arch.