Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!
The bigger problem here is tivoization. You can build a fresh kernel from source but you have no way to install it because the bootloader is locked down.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
Imagine you make a smart toaster, and you make it entirely out of open source software. You release all the changes you made too, complying fully with the spirit of open source. People could take your software, buy some parts and make their own OSS toasters, everything’s great.
But for safety reasons, since the software controls when the toaster pops, you decide to check at boot time that the software hasn’t been modified. You could take the engineering effort to split the software into parts so that only the “pop on this heat level” part is locked down, but maybe you’re lazy, so you just check the signature of the whole thing.
This would be a gpl3 tivoization violation even though the whole thing is open source. You did everything right on the software end, it just so happens that the hardware you made doesn’t support modifying the software. Why is that a violation of a software license?
This is what makes no sense to Linus, and TBH it makes no sense to me either. Would the toaster be a better product if you could change the software? Of course. But it seems to be an extreme overreach for the FSF to use their license (and that “or any later version” backdoor clause) to start pushing their views on the hardware world.
A software author has the right to set terms for use of their software, including requiring that manufacturers provide end users certain freedoms.
"For safety reasons" is every single claim. For safety reasons, I want to block the manufacturer's software from doing what it wants. Why do the manufacturer's safety reasons overrule my safety reasons?
> This would be a gpl3 tivoization violation even though the whole thing is open source.
Copyleft has nothing to do with open source. You haven't done everything right on the software end, because the GPL isn't about helping developers. To do things right on the software end, you should keep GPL software out of your locked down device that you are using to restrict the freedom of its users.
> Would the toaster be a better product if you could change the software? Of course.
You just said that it would be an unsafe product if you could change the software. Now you're using the "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" trope to pretend that you would of course support software freedom in an ideal, magical, childish, naïve dream world.
> it seems to be an extreme overreach for the FSF to use their license
People can license their software how they want. Is it an extreme overreach for Microsoft to not let you take their Windows code and do whatever they want with it? Why are you even thinking about GPL code when there's so much overreach coming from Adobe? They don't let you use their code under any circumstances!
All of your reasoning is motivated, and I would recommend that people not buy your toaster.
Nothing is stopping the "hardware world" from developing their own operating system. But as long as they choose to come as guests to the FSF/GPL party, partake of the snacks and fill their glasses at the free-refills fountain, they're expected to abide by the rules. The doors not locked, they can leave any time.
And, you know, it works great. It's simple to operate and (so far!) has been completely reliable.
I can hack on it in any way that I want to. There's no aspect of it that seeks to prevent that kind of activity at all.
What would I hack it to do instead? Who knows, but I can think of a couple of things. Maybe instead of having some modes where the elements are in series, I want them in parallel instead so the combination operates at higher power. Maybe I want to bypass the thermostat with an SSR and use my own control logic so I can ramp the temperature on my own accord and finally achieve the holy grail of a perfect slice of toast, and make that a repeatable task.
Whatever it is, it won't stand in my way of doing it -- regardless of how potentially safe or unsafe that hack may be.
There are countless examples of similar toaster ovens in the world that anyone else can hack on if they're motivated to do so, and very similar 3-knob Black & Decker toaster ovens are still sold in stores today.
And yet despite the profoundly-accessible hackability of these potentially-dangerous cooking devices (they didn't even bother to weld the cover on or use pentalobular screws, much less utilize one-way cryptographic coding!), they seem fine. They're accepted in the marketplace and by safety testing facilities like Underwriters Laboratories, who seem satisfied with where the bar for safety is placed.
Why would a toaster oven (or indeed, just a pop-up toaster) that instead used electronic controls need the bar for safety to be placed at a different height?
It wouldn't. It's a thought experiment. I even said:
> Would the toaster be a better product if you could change the software? Of course.
The point is, nobody should be compelling you to make your products hackable. If you don't want to, that's your prerogative.
The problem is, before GPLv3 existed, the authors that picked GPLv2 never expressed that they wanted their software to be part of some anti-locked-bootloader manifesto... they picked it because GPLv2 represents a pretty straightforward "you can have the source so long as you keep it open for any changes you make" license. That's what the GPL was. But this whole "Or any future version" clause gave FSF carte blanche to just alter the deal and suddenly make it so anyone can fork a project and make it GPLv3. I can perfectly understand why this would make people (including Linus) very mad.
And that's why Torvalds left out "or any future version" when licensing Linux. So I'm not sure why he's "very mad" (I doubt he actually is?); his software remains on GPLv2 like he wanted.
> The point is, nobody should be compelling you to make your products hackable.
If you want to use my GPLv3 software on your product, then yes, I am requiring that you make it hackable. If you don't want to do that, tough shit. Either do so, or freeload off someone else's software.
> The point is, nobody should be compelling you to make your products hackable. If you don't want to, that's your prerogative.
I agree.
Nobody is compelled to use GPLv3 code in the appliances that they want locked-down for whatever reasons (whether good or bad) they may wish to do that. There's other routes (including writing it themselves).
They may see a sea of beautiful GPLv3 code and wish they could use it in any way they desire, like a child may walk into a candy store and wish to have all of it for free, but the world isn't like that.
We're all free to wish for whatever we want, but that doesn't mean that we're going to get it.
> But this whole "Or any future version" clause gave FSF carte blanche to just alter the deal and suddenly make it so anyone can fork a project and make it GPLv3.
This "Or any future version" part isn't part of the GPL -- of any version.
Let us review GPL v1: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.en.html
> Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of the license which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of the license, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.
The GPL itself does not in any way mandate licensing any code under future versions. An author can elect to allow it -- or not.
If they specify GPL 2, then they get GPL 2. Not 3. Not 4. Only 2.
Other versions of the GPL are ~the same in this way. (You know where to find them, right? They're easy reads.)
Products have worked this way since forever. Only since modern microprocessors and cryptography have evil companies been able to deliberately add roadblocks that are impossible to overcome (without replacing so much hardware that you've made a new toaster from scratch) in order to maximize revenue. This is predatory and should be illegal. The only reason I can see that you'd support this, is it you work for a company that makes a lot of money selling new toasters to replace broken ones, and if this is true, your company deserves to be shut down by the government.
As arguments go, this is a pretty weak one considering how obvious the solution is: Make the manufacturer not be liable for what happens when you operate the device with unauthorized software.
I understand this discussion as being about how society should deal with it, not how you could try to make the argument internal to a company.
If you're afraid that modifying the software will make the toaster overheat, then include a hardware thermal fuse. You need to anyway, in case the manufacturer software fails or the processor fails.
In the email you have linked to, he does not support tivoization. He simply says that he finds the term offensive (which is really funny coming from him).
Torvalds has also publicly stated that he doesn't think that tivoization benefits users, but it's not his battle to fight. More info on that topic can be found in the linked YT (linked at the precise time he is answering the question about tivoization, but the whole video is about GPL v2 vs GPL v3).
YT video: https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU?si=RK5ZHizoidgVA1xO&t=288
Plus, I'm pretty confident they are already doing illegal things. On my Samsung TV it wants to force update. There is no decline option, there is no option to turn off updates, only to take it completely offline. There's no way in hell these kinds of contracts would be legal in any other setting. There's no meaningful choice and contracts that strongarm one party are almost always illegal. You can't sign a contract where the bank can arbitrary change the loan on you (they can change interest but they can't arbitrarily charge how that interest is determined. Such as going from 1% to 1000% without some crazy impossible economic situation).
Someone needs to start a class action. Someone needs to push that as far as the courts will go
Why would I want a Linux computer with a huge screen?
I just want a huge screen.
I’ll provide my own connected devices, independent of the screen.
If already needs a computer in it to drive menus / modern display protocols. Having that computer be powerful enough to also decode content is barely an extra cost.
It's all relative of course, maybe you view anything you can Ghidra as not-black-box. (though this is kind of tangential to rooting - for a many/most devices you can get a hold of the blobs to reverse engineer without rooting anything)
For me, it seems so much simpler to keep the two separate. You won't be forced to wash the heating element every time you wash the cup. Can't heat a different cup while the other is in the dishwasher, unless all your cups are self-heating. Normally, the only way for a cup to break is if it shatters, but with an inbuilt heater there's electronics that can break too. And should the cup shatter, now the heater is unusable too, or vice versa.
I have to have a kettle for other purpose (including heating water for other mugs than mine), and no self-heating mug is going to be as efficient as a kettle to heat water.
Furthermore, I also put cold or room temperature liquids in my mug. With a self-heating one, I would be carrying the heating parts for absolutely no reason.
Same goes for a TV. By keeping things separated, I can decide what I do which each device and manage their lifecycle separately. If the device reading video files is included in the TV, I can't plug it to another TV or a projector or even take it with me to use it elsewhere. While I've upgraded three times my video playing device to follow tech evolution, I've kept the same TV to plug them in.
You can make coffee with a kettle, but if you are making enough coffee often enough, it does make sense to bundle a second kettle into a dedicated coffeemaker, even if you are reducing the functionality of it by doing so.
But as a "power user" of a TV, I want to compose my own setup.
In the same way, "power users" of coffee don't use a coffeemaker. They use things like French press.
(I use instant coffee myself in my non-heating mug so in this comparison I would be the person not owning a TV and watching everything on their phone?)
As a perpetual intermediate, I find that a pour-over cone is a great balance of convenience and quality.
This applies less for some physical items, I know some people are already preparing to explain why it’d be harder to make or dangerous or something but that would miss the point. Computers are incredibly easy to swap out, we already have so many ways of doing that.
Maybe I want a fast computer. None. Maybe I want to upgrade later. Maybe in a year there’s a faster cheaper one. Maybe mine is just fine right now but I need a new screen. Why do I need to bundle the two things together? There’s a simplicity for users unboxing something but there’s not (I think) an enormous blocker to having something interchangeable here.
It is fair to observe a separation methodology, but I also have to say, in some cases multi-purpose devices have their place.
If, say, the self-heating mug involved solar harvesting, I'd put a couple in my kettle bag, for sure.
This provides absolutely zero advantages to the oven or to the microwave. It does cause a lot of stupid, easily foreseeable problems:
- There's only one control panel, and if the oven is currently active, some of the microwave controls get disabled.
- The microwave is awful in various ways -- regardless of whether the oven is active -- which wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, because microwaves are very cheap. But...
- It's impossible to replace the microwave, a $50 device, without simultaneously replacing the oven, a $2000 device.
Because I can then easily upgrade my computer without upgrading my TV.
This entire subthread is not computer-literate. Your monitor contains a computer. A dumb display contains a computer. Your keyboard contains a computer.
You can strip the software down on them so they do nothing but take commands and drive whatever electronics you have attached to them, but it will still be software on a computer. If there's a lot of RAM and a fat processor, like on a rooted smart TV, I might (but not necessarily) make it do a little more than that.
The same reason I don't want anything else in my life to be a computer. A computer is one more component that can fail and take down the whole product. I want my computer to be a computer and that's it.
But for many people, we just want a monitor, maybe with speakers (I personally am fine also separating this).
I prefer separation of concerns — if I want to attach a computer to my TV, I’ll do that as a search device.
Why have a dependency on the TV hardware, when I can attach upgradable parts?
If you want to buy a bare LCD panel, they're cheap. But you're going to have to add a processor to it that runs an OS (which you're free to write yourself, along with the driver) in order for it to understand any input. All that slapped together is what we call a monitor, or a television.
If you want an analog television, they'll pay you to haul it off from wherever you see it, but you're going to have to add an external computer to it in order to process the digital information that you want to display into waveforms that you can push over coaxial cables.
Not wanting a "smart tv" means people don't want a smartphone for a television, an OS that they don't have any control over. If you want to make up another definition, you're going to have to set limits to acceptable RAM, clock speed, number of processors, and I don't know why you would waste your time doing that. The number, however, will never be zero for any of these things.
They make fixed-function chips in factories every day that do stuff like convert video signals from one format to another (including formats that LCD panels can deal with).
Like the TFP401. For illustration, here is one on a board, ready to plug into an LCD panel and use for whatever: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2218
It doesn't run an OS. It's barely even programmable, and the programmability it does have relates only to configuring pre-defined hardware functions. It doesn't have an instruction set. It can't add 1+1.
But it can bridge the gap between a consumer device that produces video and a fairly bare LCD panel. It's a very much a single-tasker.
(Do any of the current crop of consumer-oriented televisions and computer monitors use this kind of simple pathway? Most assuredly not, which is the complaint that brought us here to begin with.
But these pathways exist anyway. It's completely possible to to create an entire video display and house it in a nice-looking package, put it in a retail box, and sell it on store shelves without involving an operating system. It's not a technological limitation.)
Non-commodity consumer products are rarely sold at cost but rather at whatever price the market will bear.
> you can make it a PC and then turn it off
TV manufactories can get the best of both worlds: The people that want smart TVs, get a smart TV. The people that don't want a smart TV, can disable the smart TV features. Manufactors make one model and sell to both market segments.
Why should your preferences impose on the ones that don't want what you want? I guess the preferred way would be for manufactors to have add a feature where the tv prompts you if you want to enable smart features when you boot the tv for the first time, but it's a bit difficult when manufactors get more money when they have these features enabled by default.
The problem is that I can’t have my preference: a TV that comes without (non-essential) software installed.
This means I have no choice but to deal with required updates — or at the very least, an annoying reminder that software updates are needed — for software I never wanted in the first place.
If the software was optional — could be uninstalled, or disabled so that updates weren’t required — then I would agree with you that having all TVs be smart TVs would be fine.
But not only is it not optional, it often comes with dark patterns of imposed privacy violations and/or unwanted ads.
The OP’s solution is to “jailbreak” it with a Linux install, which the average consumer doesn’t know how to do.
Again, is fine for hackers that want to tinker with things, but the whole point of the linked article is that many people are tired of smart TVs and the annoyances that come with them.
Example: watching a movie but want the live score of a sports match scraped from a public website to be displayed in a corner.
OR while watching a sports match -- i want a overlay feed of text from a chat stream for a select web source
Looking forward for some public experiments / open projects in this space i could leverage. Dont have the skills to attempt it myself from scratch.
I mean, I didn't wanted to buy a brand new one anyway, it's very expensive and I don't need latest AI features. I found a year old model with firmware that was listed as supported by the jailbreak at the time
Global Panel Exchange Center
That's like Alibaba, except for small(ish) quantities of LCDs of any possible description.
What you buy is what companies put out into the world.
This “proprietary telemetry” is basically malware, just, it was put on the thing at the factory. Once a system is fully rooted by malware, the least-bad option is to nuke it entirely and install from scratch.
In this context where the locked-down device probably also doesn’t have a fully open source kernel and drivers, this becomes a bit tricky. Better just to use a device that doesn’t have malware on it in the first place.
Alternatively, you can plug in a Raspberry Pi that runs steam link :)
It's the same system software, just with root capacity.
That being said, there's still a bunch of nice homebrew:
- Video screensavers ala Apple TV
- DVD logo screensaver
- Adfree (and sponsorblock-integrated and optional shorts-disabling) Youtube
- Remote button remapping (Netflix button now opens Plex for me)
- Hyperion (ambilight service that controls an LED strip behind the TV)
- A nice nvidia shield emulator for game streaming from my PC with low latency
- VNC server (rarely useful, but invaluable when it is)
Sponsorblock and remote remapping are killer features for me, and the rest is just really pleasant to have.