Re: [gentoo-user] 2 to 3??

[Alan McKinnon <alan@linuxholdings.co.za>]

On Tuesday 17 July 2007, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> > The TiVo thing was completely within the word and spirit of the
> > GPL.
>
> It was *barely* within the word, and definitely not within the spirit
> of the GPL.  Don't beleive me?  Ask anyone at the FSF or RMS himself.
>  They wrote the thing.

TiVo did just that and got the A-OK signal and thumbs up from the FSF's 
lawyers. Sometime later, someone had a hissy fit, FSF reversed their 
stated position and suddenly Tivo becomes spawn of satan.

Tivo had no option, their content providers would never have given them 
a license to redistribute content without the mods they did, and the 
shareholders would never have approved of Tivo trying to go against the 
content provider's conditions. So, they obeyed the rules and as a 
measure of thanks RMS rubs elephant shit all over their faces.

It's not the software that is crippled, it's the hardware. I'm not a 
USian and don't own a Tivo but I imagine it's similar to tv decoder we 
have here locally - heavily subsidised. It's built to do one thing 
well - record and display TV shows. If you don't like the business 
model Tivo came up with, then don't use the Tivo service. After all 
it's a TV decoder, not a kidney dyalysis machine....

According to Alan Cox, the thing has a bog-standard IDe drive in it. If 
you remove it, stick it in a bog-standard pc and power up, it boots 
just fine. So, in what way have Tivo removed people's freedom as 
granted by the GPL?

alan

-- 
Optimists say the glass is half full,
Pessimists say the glass is half empty,
Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
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