Comment by pabs3
11 hours ago
Giving users the freedom to customise the code running on their machine is literally the entire point of FOSS (Free Software & Open Source). Some of the FOSS licenses (like the GNU GPL) also include this as a requirement of the license.
That said, you might be right that breaking the proprietary software when it runs on custom builds of the FOSS software would be compliant with the license. That is what TiVo did. Would be pretty annoying though, since you couldn't immediately reboot into a new distro kernel security update, since it wouldn't be known by the remote attestation stuff yet.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
What options do gamers have?
1. No games
2. Inscrutable rootkit
3. Piracy
4. Attestation, i.e. partial Tivoization
Of these, #4 seems least awful and maximally user freedom preserving. Unlike regular Tivoization, also, we're not talking about locking down the whole machine. No need. You basically just need to attest the kernel and some binary signing infrastructure. You can run custom builds of whatever else you want otherwise.
I mean, or you can run a trusted VM, as some others have suggested. Is that really any worse?