Re: Dual-Licensing Linux Kernel with GPL V2 and GPL V3

david
2007-06-14T23:47:44Z

On Thu, 14 Jun 2007, Alexandre Oliva wrote:

> On Jun 14, 2007, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
>> Tivo *respected* the freedoms, and gave source back, and gave you all the
>> same rights you had to Linux originally, and to their modifications.
>
>> How stupid are you to not acknowledge that?
>
>> Tivo limited their *hardware*, not the software.
>
> Have you ever wondered *why* it limited the hardware?
>
> Is it per chance such that I cannot modify the software that runs on
> the hardware?

if you cannot modify the software that runs on your Tivo hardware you
haven't tried very hard.

true, they don't go out of their way to make it easy, but even if they
didn't do the integrity checking of the system it still wouldn't be easy
to load your own software on the tivo, there's no path to load the
software without disassembling the hardware.

> How is that respecting the freedoms? How is this not imposing further
> restrictions?

I think the software is all available at www.tivo.com/linux that provides
you all the freedom that they got.

David Lang

>
> And, more importantly, how is it that permitting this makes for
> *better* compliance with your tit-for-tat conceptions about the GPL?
>
> I.e., if Tivoization is the only issue that you think makes GPLv3 a
> worse license than GPLv2, and you like GPLv2 because of this
> tit-for-tat, surely you should be able to explain why Tivoization
> promotes this tit-for-tat notion better than GPLv3, right?
>
>