Yes. Kinda.
How do you think Linux devs get paid? The devices are locked down, sure, but there are strong incentives to upstream code and fund further development upstream. Linux ”won” because of this. You can’t build and develop Linux for such a wide audience and hardware flora with a bunch of hobbyists.
As Linus himself said plenty of times - GPL2 was the correct choice. Roku, Tizen, Chromebooks and Amazon garbage are absolutely within what the developers intended, and the devs are doing the work after all.
From a consumer standpoint, I absolutely agree with you, open everything is wonderful. However - commercial interests currently fund most OSS development. Without those funds, development stops and developers must take other paying jobs (probably closed source). Would be nice to change this, but then we need to completely pivot our funding model. You need to pay devs, either directly or indirectly (taxes, foundations, etc).
So far, the open source community hasn’t been very good at figuring out funding models for consumer products. It usually ends with the development team needing to put food on the table, so they add a subscription and close down parts of the project. About two seconds later, the project has ten forks and the original author can’t buy groceries.
”Buy me a beer” simply isn’t s viable mechanism to fund open source. How should we do it?
Personal preference: Slowly move the public sector towards open source, and require them to provide financial aid to products they use. Not perfect, but something that could happen gradually, without shocking the system.
tl;dr: yes, but also no.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
if these companies were upstreaming code, it would not be a problem to replace the factory operating system on their products with something else. however just like phone makers, they don’t upstream the driver code needed for the onboard devices to work.
so far the only good I found to have come of it, is that after we find a vulnerability in their code, we can open a shell in the system and use ready made familiar tools to try to tame the devices from inside. until they force an update that patches the vuln because it got too popular, and you are locked out again.
enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Agreed, it’s not perfect, especially not with regards to drivers from some of them. But:
insights.linuxfoundation.org/…/contributors?timeR…
I expect that the ability of B2C-products to keep their code somewhat closed keeps them from moving to other platforms, while simultaneously pumping money upstream to their suppliers, expecting them to contribute to development. The linked list is dominated by hardware vendors, cloud vendors and B2B-vendors.
Linux didn’t win on technical merit, it won on licensing flexibility. Devs and maintainers are very happy with GPL2. Does it suck if you own a Tivo? Yes. Don’t buy one. On the consumer side, we can do some voting with our wallets, and some B2C vendors are starting to notice.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
as I see there are no TV and only one or two smartphone makers that are not tivo, so saying that is equal to “don’t buy home appliances, move into the woods”