Since the main point of the Free Software Foundation's new GPL3 (General Public License 3) is to prevent "TiVo-isation," this surely does not come as a surprise. However, Information Week reports that in an SEC filing, TiVo says: "If the currently proposed version of GPLv3 is widely adopted, we may be unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU/Linux operating system into our software, which could adversely affect our business."
The crux of the case is that TiVo uses GNU/Linux with added DRM (digital rights management), exploiting a loophole in GPL2. GPL3, according to FSF-founder and GNU-father Richard Stallman, "doesn't forbid DRM, or any kind of feature. It places no limits on the substantive functionality you can add to a program, or remove from it. Rather, it makes sure that you are just as free to remove nasty features as the distributor of your copy was to add them."
TiVo could, of course, stick with GPL2, and this might suit Linus Torvalds, who started the development of the Linux kernel used in GNU/Linux. However, as Stallman points out:
there is no legal way to combine code under GPLv2 with code under GPLv3 in a single program. This is because both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are copyleft licenses: each of them says, "If you include code under this license in a larger program, the larger program must be under this license too."
Plenty of code will be released under GPL3, and this means derivative programs will also come under GPL3, even if large portions derive from GPL2 resources.
Companies that want to freeload on free software do have other options. The main one is the Berkeley BSD version of Unix used in Mac OS X, which allows you to hijack the code to develop a proprietary product. How easy it would be for TiVo to switch is another issue.
