On 18/06/07, Alexandre Oliva <[email protected]> wrote:
On Jun 17, 2007, "Jesper Juhl" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 17/06/07, Alexandre Oliva <[email protected]> wrote:
> [snip]
>> Serious, what's so hard to understand about:
>> no tivoization => more users able to tinker their formerly-tivoized
>> computers => more users make useful modifications => more
>> contributions in kind
> I have to disagree.
Your analysis stopped at the downside of prohibiting tivoization. You
didn't analyze the potential upsides,
Maybe that's because I don't really see any up sides.
As I see it, if we prevent tivoization, then the most likely outcome
will be that a very few number of vendors will switch to ROM based
solutions or similar (everyone lose, both vendor and user), a few
vendors that currently tivoize hardware may open up their hardware but
I doubt that will be very many, and the vast majority of vendors will
move to *BSD or proprietary software since they simply can't or won't
open up their hardware.
So no, I don't think there are any upsides. We'll lose a huge number
of developers, testers and users inside the business comunity and
we'll lose a lot of exposure (like "hey, did you know TiVO actually
runs Linux inside? Isn't that cool?)... Gaining a few hobyists at the
expense of driving a huge number of businesses away from GPL'ed
software does not look like an upside to me.
so you may indeed come to
different conclusions, and they may very well be wrong.
Just because I come to a different conclusion than you doesn't
nessesarily make it wrong.
It's very human to look only at the potential downside of an action
and conclude it's a bad action.
And you believe yourself to be immune to that - right?
> Let's say that for some reason I don't want the end users of my
> device to tinker with the software inside my device.
Ok, keep the *want* in mind. This is very important.
No, it is not. When I wrote that I meant "don't want" as in "really
don't want to since it'll destroy our business" or "really really
don't want to since we would be breaking the law" etc.
> Now I think you can agree to these things being positive:
Yes, even if I'd phrase them slightly differently.
> The only downside is that the end user purchasing the device can't
> install modified versions of the software on it.
And therefore you severely limit the number of end users who might
turn into contributors because of self interest in hacking the device
to suit their needs.
Most people don't care about hacking their devices, and of the few who
do only a subset have the skill and only a subset of those will
actually contribute anything back. This is a *small* set of people and
gaining that small set at the expense of losing the large number of
contributers from various companies doesn't make sense to me.
> Now let's try it in a GPLv3 universe. Since I can no longer create my
> device without having to allow the end user to install modified
> software on it
False assumption. You can create the device using GPLv3 software in
it.
Not as long as I want to prevent the user from tampering with it, no.
So your acccounting of necessary downsides is only one of the
possibilities. The other possibility would be to have the program in
ROM, of course, which would come with a completely different set of
downsides, but that would retain all of the "these things being
positive" you mentioned above.
But do you really expect a vendor to put a device on the market where
they also lock themselves out of upgrading it and releasing new
software for it? That's just rediculous.
And, remember, since you merely don't *want* the end user of the
device to tinker with the software, you have the option to do let them
do that.
See above.
And, if you do, they may find in themselves reasons and incentives to
change the software in the device, and the improvements are likely to
get back to the community and thus back to you. Everybody wins.
For a few select individuals that may be true. But for the majority of
the population it won't mean a thing.
This is the upside that you left out from your analysis, and from
every other analysis that set out to "prove" that anti-tivoization is
bad that I've seen so far.
I'm sorry, but I don't think it holds water.
It appears that people are so concerned about whatever little they
might lose from requiring respect for users' freedoms that they don't
even consider what they might win, and that they *would* win if at
least some of the vendors were to make an choice more favorable to
their users and the community.
Contrary to you, I don't believe any significant number of companies
will do that. It's simply better for business to just use other
software in that case.
--
Jesper Juhl <[email protected]>
Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html
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