On Thu, 21 Jun 2007, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 04:07:57PM -0400, Michael Poole wrote:
I do not say that the BIOS is doing anything (legally) wrong. The
wrong act is distributing the binary kernel image without distributing
complete source code for it.
So how about this idea then:
Tivo builds a kernel for their box, and release all the sources for how
to build exactly that kernel.
Tivo builds a bios image for their box, and encodes into it the checksum
of the kernel, or at least parts of it that they want to ensure are
present and unmodified.
Everytime the device boots, it checks the kernel image, and it the
checksums match, it loads and runs the kernel, and otherwise it checks
if there is a new bios image with a proper signature, updates itself and
reboots and tries again.
the bios doesn't have enough capability to talk to the outside world for
updates.
what tivo actually does is very similar to this
they encode into the bios the ability to check a checksum/signature for
the kernel+boot filesystem and if they don't match look to see if there is
another kernel+boot filesystem available
then software on the boot filesystem checks to see if the rest of the
system has been tampered with before it mounts /
Preventing people from doing things with their own hardware certainly
seems morally wrong, but legally, I don't see any way to prevent it.
I suppose you could say in the license: You may not use this code in any
way if you do what the RIPP/MPAA/etc want you to do.
the GPLv3 is trying to do this.
David Lang
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