Antifeatures

Antifeatures are a way to describe a particular practice made possible by locked down technologies. Antifeatures, as I describe them, are functionality (i.e., "features) that a technology developer will charge users not to include. You can read my short article on the topic published in the FSF bulletin in 2007 for a series of examples and a more in-depth description.

One thing I want to do is put together as large a collection of these antifeatures as possible to use in a talk, a paper, or maybe even a book!

List of Antifeatures

Panasonic Camera Batteries

Panasonic issued a firmware update with an antifeature which disabled any third party batteries.

Phone Books

You need to pay money to have your phone number not listed in a phone book.

Onetime Use Cameras

Disposable video cameras have a USB port which is standards compliant in terms of protocol but which is obscured to make it so that normal users can't just connect over USB.

Viao Freshstart

Sony started trying to chart its users to not install software on new computers.

DVDs

DVDs include a whole collection of different antifeatures. These include things like region coding, DVD CSS, other types of DRM, and more. No user asked for any of these and you can pay extra for non-region coded DVDs -- which is just one example.

Add Yours

Feel free to add your own ideas for antifeatures to this page so I can collect them and use them in an upcoming talk, paper, or maybe even a book!

You can use the following template:

=== NAME OF YOUR ANTIFEATURE ===

Change this paragraph so that it includes the details of your Antifeatures and any [http://example.com links].