To be fair, my post was primarily addressing the "information should be free" crowd, particularly those who think that OSS is the only way to go and proprietary software is somehow evil. (These people also seem to be content stealing* movies and music). This isn't the same as the OSS community, although anecdotally there seems to be a lot of overlap.

So, would you be happy with a License to Tinker that doesn't allow an arbitrary company to legally take advantage of the R&D efforts of the people who created the product (software and/or hardware), but would still keep it fully open for your tinkering?

This wouldn't necessarily replace OSS software; there's nothing wrong with people deciding to release their work under the GPL or any other license. However, it does concern me when people think that all software MUST be released under such a license because this allows other companies to get a free ride (as in my Asus example) and profit off the original creators work. This also implies that the R&D process has no value, but the manufacturing process somehow does. I believe the net effect would be to discourage the creation process, leading to stagnation and exclusively promoting annoying business models such as ad-driven software.

* - The pedant who mentions that copyright violation is not a criminal act is an example of said person. :-)