Linux Journal: Seal It or Hack It?

[ Thanks to Don Marti
for this link. ]

“Perhaps the tone of my message was misrepresented; I’m not an
advocate of closed systems per se, I’m an advocate of individual
rights; I fully support the goals of the GPL and have for well over
ten years. As a manufacturer, however (my company is working on a
limited-market product), I’d like to both be in a position to
support the GPLed product space and community and be able to
protect my company’s privacy rights. It’s similar to my view on MP3
sharing technology; MP3s should be shared freely, cheaply and
easily up to and including free distribution, so long as the author
(not necessarily the copyright holder) has both knowledge of, and
grants permission for, that distribution to occur.

“Mr. Schoen is incorrect on a number of points. When consumers
buy a product, they are bound by the usage guidelines of the
licensing agreement of that product. In practicality, this means if
I buy Windows XP, I do not have rights to duplicate it, run it on
multiple machines or sell it; when I buy an embedded application,
this usually means that I can’t rip apart the box, hack the OS, add
additional features, etc., unless the manufacturer has given me
explicit or implicit permission to do so (such is the case with
TiVo, who seems to have green-lighted such modification). Most
hardware manufacturers explicitly prohibit reverse
engineering…”

Complete
Story