GPL Violations By D-Link and Boxee

An anonymous reader submitted a link to a bit of a rant on GPL issues connected to D-Link and Boxee. They spend quite a bit of time explaining "Tivoization is a dangerous attempt to curtail users' freedom: the right to modify your software will become meaningless if none of your computers let you do it. GPLv3 stops tivoization by requiring the distributor to provide you with whatever information or data is necessary to install modified software on the device."

Comments

no GPL issue with tivoization

[DMiax]

First: there is no issue with GPL and tivoization. GPLv2 allows it and GPLv3 forbids it, full stop. It is as clear as day and every developer can make an informed choice as to what he/she wants to allow with the code.

Now it seems that these things include GPG that is under GPLv3. So it looks an awful lot as a violation, if confirmed. At the same time it seems that the program was removed by online firmware updates, so everything would be kosher for the GPLv3 (that gives the option to stop distributing the offending code and be legally safe)

Re:Cue the flamewars

[Eunuchswear]

All that proves is one of the utilities in the distro uses GPLv3. This strikes me as irrelevant, as I could install this under Cygwin on a windows machine and it would not automatically apply GPLv3 to Windows itsel

That's not the point. If you had gpgv2 on windows you could update it, Windows won't prevent you from doing that.

If you have gpgv2 on this boxee thingy you can't update it - the tivoisation prevents that.

That is a gplv3 violation, so they have no right to distribute gpgv2.

This may or may not apply to other software on the boxee.