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.
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 12 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 6 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”