TiVo fears new open source license will harm business
As if TiVo honestly needed any more reasons to fear for its life, it looks like the forthcoming version of the General Public License could actually do more "harm to its business." It the firm's most recent regulatory filing, it warned that the third version of the aforementioned license "would prohibit manufacturers of consumer appliances that use open source software from implementing technical measures designed to prevent user modifications," essentially giving the TiVo hackers of the world even fewer hoops to jump through. TiVo fears that if GPLv3 is widely adopted, it may be "unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU / Linux operating system into its software," which would obviously affect the outfit in a negative fashion. Notably, Novell has also spoken up about how this latest document could "disrupt its Linux distribution partnership with Microsoft," but unless something major happens rather hastily, the Free Software Foundation reportedly expects GPLv3 to be published sometime this summer.
