The reality of your software being a black box is not a matter of marketability. It is a matter of what you are able to know and control about what your personal machine is actually doing. Obviously there are manifest examples of people running all manner of black boxes, but as someone else pointed out, they are at the complete mercy of their black box vendor (unless someone wants to reverse engineer the box). If your vendor folds up and a critical vulnerability is exposed or is being openly exploited, well, congratulations on your new black brick.
On the other hand, if you have complete visibility into what your machine is doing and have the ability to modify it at will you can avoid all manner of failure scenarios that are essentially unrecoverable in the black box scenario.
We know people will run black boxes, drink poisoned sugar drinks, support genocidal megalomaniacs, torture others for limited monetary gain and/or endorphin rushes, etc. None of those realities imply that others should follow in the same footsteps, especially when there are workable alternatives that don't suffer from the same permanent failure scenarios.
I think you are a bit too idealistic about the hacking capabilities and willingness of people in general. It is convenient the correct functioning of my car or my phone is the responsibility of someone specific else than me.
Civilization is characterized by specialization of people. I cherish the notion that hardware and software should be based on open standards. For day to day work, I just want my gear to work. If it fails, I certainly do not have the time to dig in to the software layer because I have a work, children, housekeeping duties, and a bunch of art projects and higher level concepts I want to focus on.
"if you have complete visibility into what your machine is doing and have the ability to modify it at will you can avoid all manner of failure scenarios that are essentially unrecoverable in the black box scenario."
You presume all software is trivially simple. I can tell you, it is not. A large category of software requires years of specialization to actually grok what is happening.
As an extreme example if I owned a plane I would not like to hack it's software under any circumstance unless I were a professional aeronautics professional, and probably not even then.
> As an extreme example if I owned a plane I would not like to hack it's software under any circumstance unless I were a professional aeronautics professional, and probably not even then.
But would you download an alternative distribution made by a group of enthusiastic aeronautics professionals that has been used by tons of other people with no problems? Think Cyanogenmod.
If I was a manufacturer of planes I would probably figure out if it could be used. As a private individual - no way.
In this plane software example if I was a plane manufacturing org I could dedicate people to integrate it and test it.
There is a difference between an organization dedicated to making a product and a group of hobbyists coming together to scratch their itch. There is a scale, a threshold, above which you need big-org organization and sharing of responsibilities.
Small expert teams are fantastic for the sort of projects that can be done by small expert teams. For larger things there needs to be a bit more infrastructure and organization, or at least continuity of many, many years.
There is a threshold in software complexity after which one really needs lots of organized testing and fixing.
As a private user, if I fail the firmware update on my shiny plane, it's all on me. Unless there was some weird insurance to cover the costs.
Considering the quality of cyanogenmods "stable" releases, never. Hobbyist professionals are still hobbyists and not liable for the damage their code may do.
On the other hand, if you have complete visibility into what your machine is doing and have the ability to modify it at will you can avoid all manner of failure scenarios that are essentially unrecoverable in the black box scenario.
We know people will run black boxes, drink poisoned sugar drinks, support genocidal megalomaniacs, torture others for limited monetary gain and/or endorphin rushes, etc. None of those realities imply that others should follow in the same footsteps, especially when there are workable alternatives that don't suffer from the same permanent failure scenarios.