> If a company is interested in "protecting their IP" by closing the source then it's questionable why they would have even wanted to use GPLv2 software at all. That also is not related to the security of the customer at all. Maybe it matters to the security of the OEM, but that's different.
I can't speak for other engineers. But at companies I've worked in, a common product model is "embedded Linux with GPLv2 software, and some proprietary secret-sauce binaries". At those companies, they usually do send patches to upstream open-source projects and they try to contribute. Also they usually provide full source-code on request, for everything except the proprietary stuff.
The net effect of GPLv3 has been that GNU packages basically don't exist on embedded devices any more. Which means that engineers like me don't have the professional opportunity to contribute features and patches. It sort of isolates GPLv3 projects into a walled garden, which I feel like is the opposite of what GPL was intended to foster. Instead, I can only have the professional opportunity to contribute on GPLv2 or permissive-license projects.
> Complying with the GPLv3 doesn't mean the device becomes vulnerable to botnets. All it means is that the customer who purchased the device has to get access to the hardware keys. For their own device. That they purchased.
I sympathize with the intent behind this. There are also just some practical realities that are tough. At my current company, the team working on our next embedded Linux product is pretty small. We don't have infinite time or resources to make sure that our own code is 100% intrusion-resistant - all we can do is try our best.
It's a big ask for us to support _two_ methods of firmware-update (local and over-the-network) with different keys/security requirements for each. We just plain don't have the manpower to support that, not when we can be developing features to improve our product instead.
And if you have access to the filesystem, it's that much easier to comb through it and look for vulnerabilities in our network updater (for example). And it's easier to pick apart the proprietary bits with Ghidra or something. Could you do it anyways, even without our help? Maybe. But it's much harder.
Can we design a system that's robust enough to allow you to install whatever you want on your unit? Maybe. Probably. Hopefully we're already there. But I'm not going to risk my company's livelihood on it just to ship GPLv3 software, especially considering that there are almost-as-good alternatives for a lot of it. We just don't have the resources to make sure we cover every security angle on an open-box system.