Tivoization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aw, this is a bit harsh, isn’t it? Unfortunately, we seem to have come into a world where hardware and software are bundled & sold as a single monolithic entitiy. In other words, you can buy the iPhone (or TiVo) but the only software you can run on it is the one approved by the manufacturer. I’m not sure how exactly I feel about that restriction…
Tivoization is the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license, but uses hardware to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware. Richard Stallman coined the term and believes this practice denies users some of the freedom that the GNU General Public License GNU GPL was designed to protect.[1] The term came about in reference to TiVo’s use of GNU GPL licensed software on the TiVo brand digital video recorders DVR.