On 6/14/07, Lennart Sorensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Nothing prevents you from taking tivos kernel changes and building your own hardware to run that code on, and as such the spirit of the GPL v2 seems fulfilled.
Oh, come on: you're not serious, right? Something indeed prevents me -- the fact that I'm not a hardware manufacturer, I don't have fabs, outsource vendors to provide me w/ designs, ASICs, etc. Nor to I have the money to pay one-off prices for various components if they're even available in batches that small. This argument seems totally disingenuous to me. The GPLv<3 was written in a time when the majority of sotware to which the license was applied was written for general purpose computers. The "user" was the owner of the computer, and Freedom 0 was about letting that user RUN modified copies of the software. Things have changed a lot; we're surrounded by embedded computers, and Freedom 0 seems to strongly imply I should have the right to run modified versions of the Free Software I own on the hardware I OWN. Or is the future of Open Source that you'll be able to hack on free software as long as you work for Intel, Red Hat, TiVO, Google or OSDL? Or own many-thousand-$$ fab printer? Look, I totally respect Linus' and others' position that the license is an inappropriate way to enforce what they feel are hardware design decisions, but can we dispense w/ the silly argument that the intent of the GPL is fullfilled as long as the user is allowed to modify the software where modify means "imagine a world where they'd be able to run" it? Dave - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/