| ▲ | ssl-3 3 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I have a toaster oven in my kitchen. It's a dumb thing with a bimetallic thermostatic switch, a simple mechanical timer (with a clockspring and a bell), and a switch to select different configurations of heating elements. The power-on indicator is a simple neon lamp. (It also certainly has some thermal fuses buried inside; hopefully, in the right places.) And, you know, it works great. It's simple to operate and (so far!) has been completely reliable. I can hack on it in any way that I want to. There's no aspect of it that seeks to prevent that kind of activity at all. What would I hack it to do instead? Who knows, but I can think of a couple of things. Maybe instead of having some modes where the elements are in series, I want them in parallel instead so the combination operates at higher power. Maybe I want to bypass the thermostat with an SSR and use my own control logic so I can ramp the temperature on my own accord and finally achieve the holy grail of a perfect slice of toast, and make that a repeatable task. Whatever it is, it won't stand in my way of doing it -- regardless of how potentially safe or unsafe that hack may be. There are countless examples of similar toaster ovens in the world that anyone else can hack on if they're motivated to do so, and very similar 3-knob Black & Decker toaster ovens are still sold in stores today. And yet despite the profoundly-accessible hackability of these potentially-dangerous cooking devices (they didn't even bother to weld the cover on or use pentalobular screws, much less utilize one-way cryptographic coding!), they seem fine. They're accepted in the marketplace and by safety testing facilities like Underwriters Laboratories, who seem satisfied with where the bar for safety is placed. Why would a toaster oven (or indeed, just a pop-up toaster) that instead used electronic controls need the bar for safety to be placed at a different height? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | ninkendo 3 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Why would a toaster oven (or indeed, just a pop-up toaster) that instead used electronic controls need the bar for safety to be placed at a different height? It wouldn't. It's a thought experiment. I even said: > Would the toaster be a better product if you could change the software? Of course. The point is, nobody should be compelling you to make your products hackable. If you don't want to, that's your prerogative. The problem is, before GPLv3 existed, the authors that picked GPLv2 never expressed that they wanted their software to be part of some anti-locked-bootloader manifesto... they picked it because GPLv2 represents a pretty straightforward "you can have the source so long as you keep it open for any changes you make" license. That's what the GPL was. But this whole "Or any future version" clause gave FSF carte blanche to just alter the deal and suddenly make it so anyone can fork a project and make it GPLv3. I can perfectly understand why this would make people (including Linus) very mad. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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