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Comment by maxloh | Hacker News Reader

Although I don't agree with the FSF's way of advocating it [1], I do believe that unlocking the bootloader should be a customer's basic right. You don't truly own your device if you cannot control the software you run with it.

[1]: Linus Torvalds argues that the FSF tried to "sneak in" an additional clause to prohibit hardware locking. Since Linux was originally licensed with an "or later version" variant of GPL v2, that would've created a situation where Linus could not merge other people's work into the kernel without relicensing the upstream project to GPL v3. To prevent this, he later explicitly relicensed the kernel as GPLv2-only. https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU

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One of the very few genuinely bad takes Linus had.

Bootloader unlocking should be a basic consumer right, and if Linux went GPLv3, it would be closer to reality.

I think expecting software licenses to enforce your rights outside of the realm of software is a pretty bad take. I think Linus's take is quite solid: "I give you my source code, you give me your changes back, and we're even". There are a lot of us who don't think that FOSS should be weaponized as a poison pill to enact the authors worldview on topics outside of the realm of software alone.

If it should be a consumer right, why limit it only to devices certain types of software? Why not consumer protection law that applies to all devices? I think software licenses are the wrong tool for this problem.

There's a lot of crazy crayon licenses out there that try to fix the whole world by tacking on a whole lot of restrictions to their software licenses, prohibiting use for a long list of reasons... to me it sounds like a bunch of newspeak, as if "more restrictions = more freedom"

Is being able to replace software on the devices I own not in "the realm of software" somehow?

"Sure, you can have the sources, you just can't use them on your own devices because the vendor that shipped it has decided to bar you from doing that with a 2048-bit RSA key" just feels like GPL was upheld in letter, but not in spirit.

Yeah, it is -- you're asking for restrictions on pieces of hardware unrelated to the original software other than the fact that someone decided to install it on there.

How would you feel if a piece of hardware came with a license prohibiting software developers from using encryption to secure their systems?

The root of the issue here is that phone hardware landscape is effectively a duopoly. It is an antitrust issue. Trying to use software licenses to do this 1) won't be effective because the duopoly will never use them, and 2) is like going around your ass to get to your elbow. Even if it did work it wouldn't get to the root of the issue. The law needs to fix the fact that almost all phones on the planet are controlled either directly or indirectly by two companies.

Surely you mean phone operating system landscape? There are plenty of phone manufacturers.

Sadly I did not. They’re all

> controlled either directly or indirectly by two companies

While many manufacturers physically make Android phones they all functionally play by Google’s rules as a contractual condition to get proprietary gApps.

Amazon even tried to pull off an Android fork without gApps but failed.

The only third option is Huawei’s HarmonyOS if you live in China.

It’s not Linus Torvalds’ duty to make bootloader unlocking a reality.

It isn't. But he could have contributed massively to it, and hasn't, and I can and will hold it against him.

There will always be more ways for companies to extract value without contributing. Linus would have to continuously upgrade licenses from GPLV2 to V3 to Affero and so on. It is not really practical.

What Linus has contributed is already huge. We can't put all the burden of making the world right on him.

Like the industry wouldn't adapt to a more hostile license from linux? Huawei built their own OS, google has fuschia (and g* knows what else)

Would it be better if apple and google flipped the switch and made all future devices 100% closed sourced?

The likes of Microsoft, Apple, Sony and Nintendo already run kernels with less open licenses than Linux on their own devices. Others decided that maintaining their own kernel is too much.

So, what would Linux being more open really have changed?

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