[kogepathic]

The author has a good point but I am surprised they neglected to mention the most important aspect for any aspiring appliance maker:

The BSD license

Yes, thanks to the magic of the BSD license you can ship an appliance that is nothing more than a vanilla BSD and some hacky scripts and never have to worry about your customers demanding to see how much jank you have shoved into the box.

[enriquto]

As a user, that is precisely the main drawback of the bsds (as much as I love them, especially OpenBSD). If I'm using a bsd in some third-party computer, some icky middleman may have changed stuff in the system for which I'm not allowed to see the patches. If the license was GPL, I would have the right to see these changes!

Forbidding your users to see the inner workings of the system (hiding the jank that has been shoven into the box, as you say), does not seem like a positive thing..

[kogepathic]

> Forbidding your users to see the inner workings of the system (hiding the jank that has been shoven into the box, as you say), does not seem like a positive thing..

Indeed, I don't consider the BSD license a good thing from a user's perspective. Companies love BSD/MIT licensed software though.

Maybe I should have included a "/s" in my post.

[BSDobelix]

Has nothing to do with the licence, if you need a lawyer (GPL) to see the magic changes in your appliance, you should probably not trust that vendor.

Also, if the appliance vendor has put in some binary blob/module, you have no right to see that either (only the changes to the kernel). In the end, it really doesn't matter.

Buy proprietary stuff or don't.

[michaelt]

I mean, it's not great.

But there's plenty of jank in e.g. Android phones. And of course anything the vendor doesn't feel like open sourcing they can just cram into something like 'google play services' to keep it closed source.

And vendors who want to TiVo-ize Linux can do it just fine, thanks to the Linux kernel embracing the TPM.

[exe34]

> If the license was GPL, I would have the right to see these changes!

if you can afford the lawyers.

[jasoneckert]

I would have argued that the most important aspect for any aspiring appliance maker is security, and that OpenBSD provides for that incredibly well.

[darby_nine]

I don't think consumers value security that much.