|
|
|
|
|
|
by matheusmoreira
878 days ago
|
|
|
Linus Torvalds enjoys an incredibly good negotiating position relative to these corporations. Simply put, he's got massive leverage in the form of Linux's staggering development speed: he gets like a zillion patches an hour. He maximizes that leverage by purposefully keeping the kernel APIs and ABIs unstable so they can't reliably target it without mainlining their drivers as GPL code in the kernel tree. Corporations modifying Linux have the choice of playing ball and publishing source code or being forced to play catch up with the constantly changing kernel until the end of time which is obviously unsustainable and ends with them getting left behind and eating dust. This manifests as shitty products which run outdated tainted kernels and never get updated. That's what leads Linus to be "lenient" towards these corporations and their violations. He thinks their products are mere toys that don't matter in the grand scheme of things. I remember reading an email on LWN where he used that exact word to describe them. Toys. Obviously, as the users of these shitty products, we think differently. We'd very much enjoy it if some courts were to force these corporations to publish their source code under the GPL. Then we'd be able to have actual quality drivers instead of their proprietary nonsense, and we'd be able to run the latest mainline kernel on our devices. |
|
|
GPL or no GPL, we're talking about a TV here. I seriously doubt that they have a bootloader that's willing to run unsigned code. So maybe you'd be able to inspect what is running on your TV, but I doubt you'd be able to actually run your own kernel on it without some sort of jailbreak.