Did your Roku TV decide to strong arm you into giving up your rights or lose your FULLY FUNCTIONING WORKING TV? Because mine did.
It doesn’t matter if you only use it as a dumb panel for an Apple TV, Fire stick, or just to play your gaming console. You either agree or get bent.
The worst part is that all these Smart TVs run Linux, whose GPL license was explicitly designed to prevent this sort of user-hostile bullshit. Unfortunately, because the Linux contributors decided to stick with version 2 of the license instead of converting to version 3, it’s stuck with a loophole that allows companies to get away with this abuse.
It’s a goddamned travesty.
The GPL ensures user software freedom for us to remove this crap by requiring them to share their source code. Using Linux doesn’t mean they have to follow the GPL unless they make modifications to it.
You need every software contributors to agree to a license change unless the license gives an upgrade option. Most contributors had no choice but to use GPLv2 as it wasn’t “GPLv2-or-later” to start with, maybe it was posdible at one point but they didn’t want to anyway.
The GPL ensures user software freedom for us to remove this crap by requiring them to share their source code. Using Linux doesn’t mean they have to follow the GPL unless they make modifications to it.
That’s not quite the issue.
First of all, the GPL requires you to make the source available if you distribute the software, whether you modify it or not. And in fact TV manufacturers do provide source code, if you dig through their websites to find the disused basement lavatory with the sign saying “beware of the leopard.”
Second, the issue is that the source code isn’t actually going to work if you try to compile it and install it on the device, because they have DRM to prevent anything other than what the manufacturer has cryptographically signed from being allowed to run. See also: Tivoization.
