Conditions imposed after sale

I am trying to purchase a printer that does not impose conditions after sale.

In January of 2011, I tried buying a Lexmark Laser printer that supported PCL6 and Postscript 3. I returned the printer in its unopened box after noticing a "Patent lincense" claiming The I did not own the print cartridge, and was required to mail them back to the manufacturer after a single use. This also reminded me that Lexmark region-codes their cartridges for price discrimination. The $200 printer with $400 printer features was essentially "too good to be true" (being sold like razor blades).

I was so upset, I avoided buying anything from the store that sold me the printer for over a year. I did not think it was fair that they would sell items that impose conditions after sale without warning their customers. Sadly, any retailer selling compters bundled with Windows probably treat their customers with equal contempt.

Last week I bought a $200 "HP LaserJet Professional M1212nf MFP" from the same retailer. I should have known the price was "too good to be true" with the included scanner. Before purchasing, I checked that it worked under GNU/Linux. With the HPLIP project (under a tri-license) supporting the printer in question, including scanning support, I came to the erronous conclusion that the printer had open-source drivers, and by extension, that the printer was not proprietary. I did not come accros this page before purchase: http://hplipopensource.com/node/309
List of printers to avoid:
http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/plugin.html
Note: a search for "M1212nf" on that page failed, the printer is listed as "m1212nf".

I also checked the box for any wierd terms and conditions imposed after sale prior to purchase. One thing I found strange was the promotion of paper with "color-lock technology" with a laser printer.

I don't really have a modern Linux distribution installed at the time of this writing, so I tried installing the Windows Print drivers first. The add new hardware wizard did not find any driver on Windows Update. The Driver CD included an EULA restricting installation to a single machine. This conflicts with the intended use as a network printer.

When I tried running hp-setup on my laptop,
HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 2.8.6b)
Printer/Fax Setup Utility ver. 7.2
said: "error: Unsupported printer model." when I specified the printer IP address on the command-line (auto-detection failed).
The minimum plug-in version specified in the above list is 3.10.4, so that behavior may be expected. However, the Linux distro on my laptop is GNewSense. They have a policy of not including binary blobs, which should produce a similar error, even with the latest version of GNewSense.
Even if I tried to install binary blobs, they probably would not work. My laptop is a MIPS64 based Lemote YeeLoong, that I purchased specifically because it would not run MS Windows without emulation.

I have another computer (x86 based) that I plan on installing the latest version of Debian on shortly. The difficulty is that even after following all the steps above, I still don't know what "Addtionally,(sic) (HPLIP Binary Plug-Ins require) the user to read and agree to a license agreement at the time of driver installation." implies because I have not been able to find the license text. That is the only reasion I am writing here, instead of returning the printer to the store as soon as possible.

What I think should happen instead:
Hardware should be documented, such that FOSS drivers can be written.
Cartridges should not be region-coded.
Inkjet printers should be dirt-cheap to maintain (possibly with a higher up-front cost).
Laser printers should not fall into the razor blade model of sales.
Sales people should warn customers if a peice of technology tries to impose conditions after sale.
If companies are not really serious about the terms they try to get their customers to "agree" to, the terms should be dropped.
It is not the job of a printer or scanner to detect currency or other DRM flags.