[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?