> Philosophically speaking, the more and more that products are sold with one purpose on a closed platform, the more and more of these products that are going to end up in the junk yards when they can't be extended or repurposed beyond what the manufacturer wanted (or ever thought) possible.

This doesn't have to be the case, though. There's nothing stopping FreedomBox from selling a pre-made hardware solution that just has the software loaded on it that anyone can load onto a vanilla server of their choosing. (And it seems they actually do this, though it's not obvious from their website.)