[kogepathic]

The author has a good point but I am surprised they neglected to mention the most important aspect for any aspiring appliance maker:

The BSD license

Yes, thanks to the magic of the BSD license you can ship an appliance that is nothing more than a vanilla BSD and some hacky scripts and never have to worry about your customers demanding to see how much jank you have shoved into the box.

[enriquto]

As a user, that is precisely the main drawback of the bsds (as much as I love them, especially OpenBSD). If I'm using a bsd in some third-party computer, some icky middleman may have changed stuff in the system for which I'm not allowed to see the patches. If the license was GPL, I would have the right to see these changes!

Forbidding your users to see the inner workings of the system (hiding the jank that has been shoven into the box, as you say), does not seem like a positive thing..

[kogepathic]

> Forbidding your users to see the inner workings of the system (hiding the jank that has been shoven into the box, as you say), does not seem like a positive thing..

Indeed, I don't consider the BSD license a good thing from a user's perspective. Companies love BSD/MIT licensed software though.

Maybe I should have included a "/s" in my post.

[BSDobelix]

Has nothing to do with the licence, if you need a lawyer (GPL) to see the magic changes in your appliance, you should probably not trust that vendor.

Also, if the appliance vendor has put in some binary blob/module, you have no right to see that either (only the changes to the kernel). In the end, it really doesn't matter.

Buy proprietary stuff or don't.

[darby_nine]

> Has nothing to do with the licence, if you need a lawyer (GPL) to see the magic changes in your appliance, you should probably not trust that vendor.

Of course! But trust is unnecessary with code in hand.

[BSDobelix]

But you don't have the code, just the changes to the Linux-Kernel, and that is often NOT the secret sauce.

Again buy proprietary or don't, the license (if opensource) has nothing to do with it.

[michaelt]

I mean, it's not great.

But there's plenty of jank in e.g. Android phones. And of course anything the vendor doesn't feel like open sourcing they can just cram into something like 'google play services' to keep it closed source.

And vendors who want to TiVo-ize Linux can do it just fine, thanks to the Linux kernel embracing the TPM.

[afiori]

Tivoization is completely orthogonal to the issue of opaque patched blobs.

For example every software/firmware using custom Risc-V instructions is tivoized.

The problem of blobs are inability to examine it and inability to reasonably modify it.

Tivoization just makes it harder to run a software/blob on different hardware.

[mrob]

>every software/firmware using custom Risc-V instructions is tivoized

I disagree. Tivoization means using hardware restrictions unrelated to the core functionality of the hardware to make it difficult to run modified code. The original Tivo checked digital signatures in the bootloader. This isn't core functionality, because it could be deleted without harming anything.

Merely writing software for unique hardware doesn't count as Tivoization. It's very common for software written for older machines to only run on that exact machine, and nobody calls it Tivoization. There has to be some feature added specifically for the purpose of restricting user freedom.

[tsimionescu]

TiVoization is about the inability to patch a system you bought to run different software. The TiVo boxes would refuse to run the proprietary TiVo software that did the whole magic if they detected a modified version of any of the system software, this is what annoyed RMS and led to the GPLv3. It's nothing like custom instructions.

[miki123211]

> For example every software/firmware using custom Risc-V instructions is tivoized.

Can you explain?

[exe34]

> If the license was GPL, I would have the right to see these changes!

if you can afford the lawyers.

[jasoneckert]

I would have argued that the most important aspect for any aspiring appliance maker is security, and that OpenBSD provides for that incredibly well.

[darby_nine]

I don't think consumers value security that much.