Something I've noticed lately is that threads and posts which inquire about (or endorse) violating the end-user license agreement (EULA) attached to various gadgets has been enforced pretty unevenly. Let me give some specific examples:
Apparently not okay
Jailbreaking your PSP to play homebrew games (per G&T)
Installing OSX on non-Apple hardware (per Stupid Technology)
Apparently okay (or at least I haven't seen mods crack down on it so far)
Jailbreaking your iPhone to run homebrew software (per H/A)
Installing dd-wrt on your router (per Stupid Technology)
All of these things are in the exact same legal gray area (as it's a standing question as to whether or not EULAs are even legal or enforceable), but they seem to be treated differently by the mod team. Would it be possible to get somebody "higher up" to comment on which of these topics are kosher (if any), and why some are held to a different standard (if indeed they are)?
tl;dr: Am I going to get infracted for giving people advice on jailbreakin' their routers or putting dd-wrt on their phones?
Posts
That's commonly used for piracy. Yes, there are legitimate uses, but by far the most common reason the average Joe does that is to play "backups" (though I also understand that playing a game without using the UMD drive increases battery life). And as per forum rules, piracy is bad. That is an actual violation of the EULA for OS X.
Jailbreaking your iPhone isn't usually done for homebrew software (but can be a perk), but rather to let you use it with non-AT&T carriers. This seems a be a legitimate issue, but obviously that's up to the mods. It should probably be treated like the OS X issue, but I think most reasonable people would have trouble seeing anything wrong with letting your use the phone on any carrier you want. Not an EULA violation or legal grey area. A router is just a piece of hardware and DD-WRT/Tomato/other firmware are legal and freely available. The source code for just about everything needed to make the router function (except the WLAN drivers) is available under the GPL (or other OSS licenses). Even if there was some EULA that said that you can't install third party firmware on it you can refuse to agree to that EULA and install DD-WRT anyway, much like how I could theoretically buy a new PC from Dell, refuse the EULA(s) for Windows and replace it with Ubuntu.
Barrakketh, this isn't really the correct venue for that discussion (even if you ARE totally wrong on your last two points), so let's not have it here.
sure fine that
Um. DD-WRT's "EULA" is the GNU GPL, version 2.
And, as Klocek v. Gateway shows, a license agreement that comes as a sheet of paper in the box, that you never click "I agree" to, has the legal validity of toilet paper.
The reason we can't discuss installing OSX on commodity PC hardware isn't because my netbook manufacturer doesn't want me installing OSX on it, because that wouldn't be legally binding anyway. It's that OSX's license agreement forbids me to install it on non-Apple hardware.
Likewise, installing DD-WRT on a router is perfectly acceptable if one never agrees to the license agreement with the router's built-in software (perhaps using the hardware-implemented TFTP interface to flash the router, which is what I needed to do for my Buffalo router anyway), because nothing in the DD-WRT license says otherwise.
Software might be "licensed" under various terms, but hardware is (at least for now) "bought" and "sold", under rules that have existed, mostly unchanged, for centuries. The manufacturer of a device doesn't have rights in perpetuity to tell you how you may and may not use that device, at least not in the United States, where Penny Arcade's servers are located. For example, Ford might say that you can only have their cars repaired at one of their licensed dealerships, but that does not automatically make it so.