My FSFE Blog
What's happening with the FSFE in London…
Linus comments on GPLv3 and it’s DRM restrictions
Linus has made some comments on the GPLv3 and it’s anti-DRM stance:
"Say I’m a hardware manufacturer. I decide I love some particular piece of open-source software, but when I sell my hardware, I want to make sure it runs only one particular version of that software, because that’s what I’ve validated. So I make my hardware check the cryptographic signature of the binary before I run it," Torvalds said. "The GPLv3 doesn’t seem to allow that, and in fact, most of the GPLv3 changes seem to be explicitly designed exactly to not allow the above kind of use, which I don’t think it has any business doing."
Hardware vendors could take advantage of Free Software for their devices but then refuse any modifed versions of the code to run. I think this would be a huge shame and if vendors had started doing this we might not have great projects such as Linux on iPod, OpenWRT and OpenZaurus