On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 01:58:26AM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote: > On Jun 14, 2007, Bron Gondwana <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Tivo gets sick of the endless flamewars on lkml, signs a copy > > of QNX, pushes it out to the hardware. No more Linux on Tivo. > > What do we lose? > > Do we actually get any benefit whatsoever from TiVO's choice of Linux > as the kernel for its device?
Sure, if they make any changes or fixes to Linux. Other than that, only the same benefit that Microsoft get from Windows piracy - TiVo employees become familiar with Linux and are more likely to use it and maybe contribute more in another job later. What we don't get is TiVo having a better kernel than everyone else because they've put some work into extending it without giving that work back. I see stuff in arch/powerpc/kernel/ which is Copyright "TiVo, Inc" and more recent stuff in usb/net/asix.c and usb/net/mcs7830.c which is more than I've ever contributed to the kernel, despite making extensive use and even selling services where I ran servers with Linux on them but didn't allow my customers to change the kernel on the servers if there was some feature they wanted to play with. > Do TiVO customers lose anything from the change from one non-Free > software to another? (the Linux binary, as shipped in the TiVO, has > become non-Free) Not particularly, no. Other than maybe some nice features that TiVo gains from being able to use Linux. Bron. - 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/
