Article explaining tivoisation

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> writes:
> Keys will be necessary if the *hardware manufacturer* has arranged for
> them to be necessary.

Ok, I think I see your point now.

> The obvious example is someone porting a free software game to a
> proprietary console (e.g., with XNA Game Studio Express), or similar.

For a proprietary console, there's not problem.  For a tivoised console:

But how would someone do that port without having been in collusion with the
person in control of the tivoisation?

So is it any different if Tivo writes the software or if Tivo colludes with
a third-party for the software to be written?


The only case where collusion with the tivoiser wouldn't be necessary is if
the port was done either with an emulator or based purely on documentation.

Why would someone do that if their software would never run?  And should we
care about software which isn't intended to be run anywhere?

(because it if was to run, the tivoisers permission would be needed, so that
would revert to first scenario where the developer is working with Tivo.)

And if the port developer intended their software to be authorised in the
future by the tivoiser, in which case users would have no more freedom than
they do with Tivos today, then that's not something GPL should accommodate.


As far as I can see, all outcomes lead to either the developer working with
the tivoiser and the user's freedoms being a dud (in which case my
characterisation is ok), or the software never running on the tivoised
device (a case that I think we can ignore).



Am I still missing something?


-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3
http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \  GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \   Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org