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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

The GPL is just incidental to Linux at this point. Linux is a collaboration between dozens of giant corporations many of which actually hate the GPL. The success of the Linux Foundation is in convincing all those companies that the viral nature of the GPL has been neutralized and it is safe to use it in their proprietary products. There is no idealism remaining but Linux is still an amazing achievement that benefits us all.

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What benefits? Only "benefits" that I can see are distributed very unevenly - strong entities like Microsoft can extract patent fees from Linux users, despite they contributed almost nothing. On the other end users like you and me are blocked from fixing the software built on GPL components on the devices they own. Which was the very situation GPL was intended to prevent.

Pretty much, why can't I run a modern kernel on the average device running Linux, whether that be an IP Camera, or a smartphone? Why are we forced to run ancient, unpatched & insecure software by Qualcomm, LG, Samsung & Google?

Technically, you can run new also insecure software by yourself on most Samsung Exynos devices at the very least, including the bootloader. Includes new kernel versions. See: http://linux-exynos.org/wiki/Main_Page

Qualcomm is much more iffy, there is some work on integrating support to mainline but it's only beginning.

You lose the warranty bit and still cannot replace FCC-approved modem firmware, because certification reasons.

The GPL incidental largely because the kernel can't do anything on its own, so the patent grab is meaningless in any practical way. That wouldn't be true of the tivoization clause in GPL3, of course.

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