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On Tuesday 17 July 2007, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: |
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> > The TiVo thing was completely within the word and spirit of the |
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> > GPL. |
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> |
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> It was *barely* within the word, and definitely not within the spirit |
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> of the GPL. Don't beleive me? Ask anyone at the FSF or RMS himself. |
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> They wrote the thing. |
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|
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TiVo did just that and got the A-OK signal and thumbs up from the FSF's |
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lawyers. Sometime later, someone had a hissy fit, FSF reversed their |
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stated position and suddenly Tivo becomes spawn of satan. |
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|
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Tivo had no option, their content providers would never have given them |
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a license to redistribute content without the mods they did, and the |
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shareholders would never have approved of Tivo trying to go against the |
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content provider's conditions. So, they obeyed the rules and as a |
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measure of thanks RMS rubs elephant shit all over their faces. |
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|
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It's not the software that is crippled, it's the hardware. I'm not a |
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USian and don't own a Tivo but I imagine it's similar to tv decoder we |
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have here locally - heavily subsidised. It's built to do one thing |
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well - record and display TV shows. If you don't like the business |
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model Tivo came up with, then don't use the Tivo service. After all |
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it's a TV decoder, not a kidney dyalysis machine.... |
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|
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According to Alan Cox, the thing has a bog-standard IDe drive in it. If |
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you remove it, stick it in a bog-standard pc and power up, it boots |
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just fine. So, in what way have Tivo removed people's freedom as |
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granted by the GPL? |
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|
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alan |
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|
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-- |
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Optimists say the glass is half full, |
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Pessimists say the glass is half empty, |
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Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be? |
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|
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Alan McKinnon |
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alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za |
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+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five |
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-- |
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