To be fair, the fact that they signed a contract saying they would pay for the phone is what's supposed to be what keeps them paying for the phone. There's already laws around paying for things you buy, so the whole "well, people wouldn't pay for their phones" argument is completely invalid.
The stats are actually pretty clear. T-mobile in particular got hit with plenty of fraud and others did too before they got better at locking things down.
Activation locks were also a control put in place to reduce what was for a while an epidemic of street crime where phones were stolen. The locks are critical and pretty popular, many DA's and cities demanded Apple put them in to try and reduce street crime - and they did.
So the idea that locks prevent theft / crime is not completely invalid. In fact, there are laws against stealing from houses and many people still lock their house. Their are laws against steeling cars and people still use keys for their cars.
It looks so unsecure. It will be much better if Apple will lock your house and car instead, so you will just ask Apple to unlock your house. If you violate Apple rules, e.g. by storing inappropriate content in your house, they will just ban you, so your city will be a much better place to live.
You realize that bootloader unlocking and carrier unlocking are totally separate, orthogonal things, right?
If this is true (it is not) than we can do all sorts of dongle type locks on devices.
GPLv3 is not just about the bootloader. They are very clear actually that vendors must release anything that is needed to bypass locks or integrity checks.
" It will depend on how the hardware was designed—but no matter what information you need, you must be able to get it."
EDIT: This?
> " It will depend on how the hardware was designed—but no matter what information you need, you must be able to get it."
The key word there is "need". You don't need the baseband unlock information to replace the stock kernel with a modified one.
If the baseband has GPLv3 software on it, then that implies the user has the right to run custom software on the baseband (at least at the same privilege level as said software), which probably implies the ability to connect it to arbitrary networks.
If only the application processor has GPLv3 software, then there is no requirement with respect to the baseband. The GPL isn't that viral.
Per the article and its citation of decade+ old precedent, that is not a new claim. Whether these requirements of the license are reasonable or not is irrelevant. If OEM's don't like the license terms then they can buy/build something else.
"scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable"
If the installer source code is missing the bit that enables installation of the GPL binaries on your device, then I guess it's not in compliance. The fact that the scope of these codes also include device keys seems somewhat irrelevant.
The solution is simple: develop your own OS, make it bulletproof, then do whatever you want. Nobody will ask to open source code of Symbian device, because it's not a GPL'ed OS.
"Complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable."
This is relatively routine.
The major new claim here is that releasing source code requires folks to unlock secure boot / root of trust / DRM type implementation on HARDWARE they sell. So release a complete work no longer (as plain language would read) means releasing the source code - but now ALSO requires that developers add various features to HARDWARE to bypass root of trust security measures which may include things around power limits or management on equipment or for things like phones sold on installment plans with a vendor lock would let folks pick up the phone on plan, root it to avoid vendor lock and then stop paying on phone.