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“Tivoization” and your right to install under Copyleft and GPL (2021)
Two schools of thought about the purpose of copyleft have been at odds for some time. Simply put, the question is: are copyleft licenses designed primarily to protect the rights of large companies that produce electronics and software products, or is copyleft designed primarily to protect individual users' rights to improve, modify, repair, and reinstall their software?
My hope herein is to fully explain the history of interpretation of GPLv2§3¶2 by pro-copyleft advocates, and explore the misdirection of arguments of those who seek to curtail users' rights to install modified versions of their GPL'd software. I've shown above that Stallman, the author of GPLv2, specifically knew about situations of embedded device proprietarization before GPLv2 was drafted, and, in contemporaneous and ongoing rhetoric, spoke clearly that he intended to preserve and advance users' right to repair their software by engaging in truly functional reinstallation of GPL'd binaries into the actual location. One of the horrible “race to the bottom” traps that GPL violators constantly lay for us is unrelenting pressure that we choose between (a) reducing what we believe a given license requires, or (b) suing them to ask the Court to uphold our view.
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