Freedom to Remove Features

A common criticism of free software and open source is that surely you wouldn't have programmers who will implement features for free for you. Even if you have the source code, modifying it is hard work. Obviously, being a programmer makes it easier, but most people just won't care about this since they don't have these powers anyway.

This is made worse by the very low price typically being charged by software companies. A feature that would take weeks to implement, translating to tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in developer time, will be sold for just a few dollars extra, possibly even for free, because of the zero marginal cost of producing copies of the result. At the same time though, if you wanted to hire someone to implement a similarly complicated feature, just for you, and put up $50 on Craigslist, you will definitely not find anyone who will do it for you.

Removing things is typically considerably easier than adding new things though. Meanwhile, a lot of commercially produced software would be a lot better if we just... removed parts of them.

To begin with: ads in general. There exist arguments (typically from ad companies) about them providing useful, personalized information to users. And yet... there exist browser extensions to remove them from websites; at the same time, there are no extensions to add them to sites which did not have them originally, revealing the typical user preference about their existence.

Some programs also like to send various pieces of information back to their producers. It is a legitimate goal to track usage and app crashes better; after all, people would take the time to submit bugreports manually and / or complain about the product in emails / forums / etc; the assumption there though is that there is value provided to both sides, with the transaction being optional to both sides. If the UI doesn't provide an "opt out" checkbox, commenting out the right couple of lines can also be a good solution, as long as we have access to them.

It doesn't even need to be about conflicts of interest; could be just a lack of caring. For example, iOS likes to show characters of your passwords as you type them in, before turning them into little dots not much after; as far as I know, there is no way to switch this off. This might be preferable for... possibly even the majority of users; there are some who would prefer the little dots all the way (slightly better security against the people standing behind you!). The solution is, yet again, taking the extra code that was added to do this, and... removing it.

You still need to have someone find these for you if you're not a "software" person; doing so is considerably faster and thus cheaper though.

(We're now happy to report that hereby your expectations on average post length & quality have now been adjusted towards realistic values.)