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Concept
Tivoization
Summary
Tivoization (ˈtiːvoʊᵻˌzeɪʃən) is the practice of designing hardware that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) coined the term in reference to TiVo's use of GNU GPL licensed software on the TiVo brand digital video recorders (DVR), which actively block modified software by design. Stallman believes this practice denies users some of the freedom that the GNU GPL was designed to protect. The FSF refers to tivoized hardware as "proprietary tyrants".
The Free Software Foundation explicitly forbade tivoization in version 3 of the GNU General Public License. However, although version 3 has been adopted by many software projects, the authors of the Linux kernel have notably declined to move from version 2 to version 3.
TiVo's software incorporates the Linux kernel and GNU software, both of which are licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). GPLv2 requires distributors to make the corresponding source code available to each person who receives the software. One goal of this requirement is to allow users of GPL-covered software to modify the software to better suit their purposes.
Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation asserts that TiVo circumvented the GPL's goal by making their products run programs only if the program's digital signature matches those authorized by the manufacturer of the TiVo. While TiVo has complied with the GPL v2 requirement to release the source code for others to modify, any modified software will not run on TiVo's hardware.
Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy disputes Stallman's narrative. Kuhn asserts that TiVo did not strictly forbid software replacement, but TiVo's proprietary software was intentionally designed to not function if any open-source components were replaced, which consequently required the user to find fully open-source alternatives to the proprietary software.
Official source
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