On 18 Jul 2007, at 13:38, Alan McKinnon wrote:
On Tuesday 17 July 2007, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
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 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.
Um... isn't a Tivo a device for recording TV programs?
In this case Tivo _has_ no content providers of their own.
As I understand it Tivo is just a fancy video recorder - a
particularly advanced one for its time, but that's all.
In these litigation-prone times I can see why Tivo bow to the content
providers, but really they have no more right to tell customers how
to use their device than LG or Philips would have to say "you're
allowed to record soap operas with this VHS recorder we sold you, but
not full-length movies".
As far as I'm concerned the GPL is a license that protects consumers.
That is the intent of it, as has been explained by Mike Edenfield so
well a couple of times in the last 24 hours. Had Tivo written their
own operating system from the ground up it would have cost them a lot
more (in time, money, resources), and they could easily have been
undercut by a competitor producing a better product based on Linux.
Under GPL v3 the competitor's success will at least ensure they have
the money to defend against lawsuits from the content providers.
The sad thing for Tivo & their proponents is that now - what? 5 years
later? less? - you can buy a Chinese DVR (digital video recorder) for
recording your TV programs for $100 or so. I'll bet the manufacturers
of those don't suck it up to "the content providers" the way Tivo has
and I'm sure lots of them will allow you to dump any program you've
recorded as DivX to CD-R or as DVD and give it to friends or family.
Tivo may have made bucks by being early to the market but the western
manufacturing philosophy of treating customers as secondary to the
media companies will come back & bite us all on the ass when
customers choose to shop elsewhere. You can't compete with giving the
customer what he wants.
Stroller.
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