alt Hacker NewsCompanies are fundamentally untrustworthy in the long term. You are always one management change away from the product being unusable or hostile to your use case. With old fashioned technology there is almost always a path to fixing it long after the company is dead.
How can you guarantee this patent-encumbered part that also requires specific (very rare) equipment and is purposefully made to be incompatible with anything is going to be produced after the company discards the product and/or becomes a patent troll? A company can be user-hostile in plenty of ways if it desires to.
It's just plain old vendor lock-in practiced forever and it's a market (or regulation) problem, not a technology one. I haven't yet seen a case where the lock-in was kept secret in the long run, you always have a clear signal that business practices of this particular company are user-hostile. There's nothing special about computers here either, you can always clearly tell that the company turns into shit. When a company starts doing something like this, stop trusting it. Or don't.