| This is more of a tangent, but I found this framing very interesting:
> which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc The FSF considers the user to be the one using cars/tivo's/other devices. In their view, this was a design flaw of gplv2 that it allowed locking out end-users of their devices. For Linux this was not the case. The important part that modifications/extensions were shared (and maybe even upstreamed), while the end user access wasn't important. The case of tivoization fractured the interest between the mostly moral "I want freedom for the end user" and the more immediately benefical "If you use my code, I want reciprocity for modifications". I personally believe that today the latter case won, even for a lot of non-gpl software that gets lots of contributions e.g. via github for lots of different reasons, but the moral case gets more dire. Looking at security for older (or shockingly often even current) devices, right to repair and lots of other issues concerning the effective loss of rights with more modern devices, the concerns of the FSF were often accurate, but with the increasingly hostile approach to "proprietary" IP and thus the exclusion of GPLv3 and similar licenses not palatable to the larger open source community. The approach to IP in china is also sometimes a lot different, see https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297. |
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27937877 https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
Apparently what TiVo did (breaking proprietary software if you modify GPLed software) is even allowed by GPLv3.