------ Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 28 2006 @ 10:13 PM EDT Taking the Tivo, I buy a box. I have the RIGHT (as given to me by all the people who wrote the software) to modify that software as I see fit.
Absolutely. Nobody disagrees with that right, and in fact, I'll stand up and fight for that right. In fact, so would hopefully Tivo itself. But that's not the issue: Unfortunately, Tivo don't accept that right - they see fit to say "if I modify the software half of the box, the hardware half will stop working". the above is just not true. Tivo does accept your right to change the software. They even tell you so in their documentation that comes with the box. They took exactly zero rights away from you, and you get to see their modifications, and make your own modifications to them, as per the GPLv2. And the Tivo box doesn't stop working just because you decided to exercise those rights either. Now, the thing that Tivo doesn't do is let you change the hardware. The hardware (and firmware) they created is designed to just work with the one particular version of software that they shipped. But that in no way means that you can't take the software, modify it to your hearts content, and run it. You just need to run it somewhere else. And that is fair (if potentially silly and anti-social - but hey, they designed and manufactured it, it's their choice). You may not agree with it, of course, in which case you shouldn't buy their hardware, but they did allow you to change the software any way you wanted, they just said "once you do that, we're not going to run it on the hardware we created". Btw, that's not so different from what I do either. When I release a Linux kernel, I say "hey, go wild. Make any changes you want, do anything you want within the license". But do you notice something missing? I'm not saying that I'll take your changes and use them myself. And I'm emphatically not letting you write to my git tree. You get the right to keep your copy, and the license effectively means that I can merge back your changes if I want to, but as with Tivo, that's my choice. I often decide that I don't want to have anything at all to do with other peoples changes. They have the right to change their copy of the software, but that doesn't mean that I'll let people put their versions into my source tree. See? It's really not so different, after all, is it? Both I and Tivo say: "you can change the software all you want", but neither I nor Tivo will automatically take those changes back to "our" side. In other words, Tivo really limits only their own hardware design. It doesn't limit the software we've all helped create, and it doesn't limit other peoples hw design. There is no bad effect of their choice of hardware design on the software they used. THEIR HW DESIGN. THEIR CHOICE. Is it a good thing to sell limited hardware? Probably not, but it happens all the time. I remember the TI calculators where they sold the identical piece of hardware but with the magic FN button not accessible on the cheaper version. The hardware could do more, but the cheaper version just didn't make it available unless you scraped away some plastic and put your own button there. Was that "evil", or was it just a choice of the hardware manufacturer to segment their market and get people to pay more for the higher-end version, without having to make two different designs (which is probably more expensive than manufacturing the thing in the first place)? And hey, those kinds of hardware/firmware choices are really no different from Tivo making the decision of making a box that is a really bright neon green, and sounds like a air-raid siren at 3AM every night. It's their choice in hardware design. And it's your choice whether you want to have a neon-green box that keeps you awake each night. In the end, "neon green and loud" is not really all that different from "only runs one particular software version", now is it? Would a neon-green and annoyingly loud box make Tivo "evil"? Or just odd and excentric? I claim the latter. Tivo is odd and eccentric, and thinks that by limiting their hardware, they can sell them better. That's obviously silly of them, but hey, that's an opportunity for others to do better. But at no point did Tivo actually limit any software that wasn't theirs to limit. Linus ------ regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss