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by drran 2056 days ago
This article is not about security. It's about device lock in, so the user will need to jailbreak the device to have control.

IMHO, tiviozation of devices should be banned by law. Currently, GPL3 forbids it only, so, please, use GPL3 for your new open source project.

2 comments

Frankly, I think open source needs to embrace the idea of 'no commercial use' as a viable license choice.

I'm not keen on the idea of a million/billion/billion+ dollar company taking code I've written for my own enjoyment and using it to disproportionately enrich the company's shareholders or abuse its customers by denying them control over their devices.

Code that can be used in closed devices shouldn't be available for the manufacturers of closed devices to use.

> abuse its customers by denying them control over their devices

That's exactly what tivoization is, so the GPLv3 already prevents that.

Please use the AGPL (3), which also defends against SaaSS. (Legitimate SaaS providers can still use it.)
It doesn't stop providers from hosting it unmodified, or with modifications that they don't care about releasing—that's why Mongo switched from it, because other providers just provided hosting for it unmodified.
They're providing a service to people – and giving back their improvements, so you can then use them (though not in your proprietary version, if you have one, unless you negotiate that). Unless your business is in hosting versions of (the free version of) your program, problem solved.