The BSD license
Yes, thanks to the magic of the BSD license you can ship an appliance that is nothing more than a vanilla BSD and some hacky scripts and never have to worry about your customers demanding to see how much jank you have shoved into the box.
Forbidding your users to see the inner workings of the system (hiding the jank that has been shoven into the box, as you say), does not seem like a positive thing..
But there's plenty of jank in e.g. Android phones. And of course anything the vendor doesn't feel like open sourcing they can just cram into something like 'google play services' to keep it closed source.
And vendors who want to TiVo-ize Linux can do it just fine, thanks to the Linux kernel embracing the TPM.
For example every software/firmware using custom Risc-V instructions is tivoized.
The problem of blobs are inability to examine it and inability to reasonably modify it.
Tivoization just makes it harder to run a software/blob on different hardware.
Can you explain?
I disagree. Tivoization means using hardware restrictions unrelated to the core functionality of the hardware to make it difficult to run modified code. The original Tivo checked digital signatures in the bootloader. This isn't core functionality, because it could be deleted without harming anything.
Merely writing software for unique hardware doesn't count as Tivoization. It's very common for software written for older machines to only run on that exact machine, and nobody calls it Tivoization. There has to be some feature added specifically for the purpose of restricting user freedom.
Indeed, I don't consider the BSD license a good thing from a user's perspective. Companies love BSD/MIT licensed software though.
Maybe I should have included a "/s" in my post.
if you can afford the lawyers.
Also, if the appliance vendor has put in some binary blob/module, you have no right to see that either (only the changes to the kernel). In the end, it really doesn't matter.
Buy proprietary stuff or don't.
Of course! But trust is unnecessary with code in hand.
Again buy proprietary or don't, the license (if opensource) has nothing to do with it.