Over the last 48 hours, Roku has slowly been rolling out a mandatory update to its terms of service. In this terms it changes the dispute resolution terms but it is not clear exactly why. When the new terms and conditions message shows up on a Roku Player or TV, your only option is to […]
This is why all OSs need to be open source and we should only argue over hardware
Or at least bare minimum in form of a documentation allowing other OSes to be develop for the hardware.
Starting with the phones…
I hate to break it to you, but Roku OS uses the Linux kernel and a bunch of other open source stuff. (The UI etc. is proprietary, but never mind that for now.)
The issue here is DRM and Tivoization, not just having access to the source code.
So the closed source OS uses open source stuff?
I hate to break it to you, but that’s still closed source and it’s not possible to replace the OS on these devices.
What I’m saying is that even if it were 100% open source, IT STILL WOULDN’T BE ENOUGH because the hardware would refuse to run anything that wasn’t cryptographically signed by Roku, Inc.
In other words, a big part of the problem is caused by Linus’s failure to adopt GPLv3.