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A comment on FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer Routers. Parent comment

Re:FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer... by vetrom on Monday March 23, 2026 @08:04PM (#47496885)
You will first probably need Congress to legislate away the long standing prohibitions against offering (easily) user-modifiable RF devices on the market.

Self ownership and full 'right to repair' has carve-outs in the FCC's regulations in the name of limiting unintentional broadcasting/radiation. Maybe a challenge to those would survive in the post-Chevron environment. I wouldn't expect any Congress in the last 25 years to pass a law which would go against the incumbent telecom lobbyist interests though, and I'd expect such a hole if it did hit case law, to get 'patched' fairly quickly.

About the only way to really solve that would be to embarrass vendors enough to open their moats.

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Re:FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer... by yjftsjthsd-h on Monday March 23, 2026 @09:32PM (#47497584)
I dunno, I'm pretty big on FOSS but I don't think you would need that to improve. Requiring that the firmware have its source code available to audit doesn't mean that users can replace it. AFAIK you could, today, with no legal changes, have a vendor release 100% of the code under eg. a MIT license while also making the device refuse to run firmware not signed with their keys. Researchers could poke at it to find bugs, and FCC regulations wouldn't be touched. (Note: IANAL, so feel free to point out if I'm wrong about that)

(To be clear, I don't think that's good enough; at a minimum I think there should be a wifi card that does refuse modifications and a main application processor that is 100% user controlled so that they can actually fix problems without needing the vendor to help, but I think it's useful to point out that auditing code doesn't require being able to install it)

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Re:FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer... by kogepathic on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @02:08AM (#47499109)
> AFAIK you could, today, with no legal changes, have a vendor release 100% of the code under eg. a MIT license while also making the device refuse to run firmware not signed with their keys.

This is already the case today with many embedded devices. They have secure boot enabled so even if the vendor releases the GPL source code (big if), you can't do anything because the device will only boot the vendor's signed firmware.

> at a minimum I think there should be a wifi card that does refuse modifications and a main application processor that is 100% user controlled so that they can actually fix problems without needing the vendor to help

This is already possible. The RF components frequently have a signed firmware blob that is verified on load. There is no reason but planned obsolescence and greed keeping the application processor locked to running the vendor's signed code.

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Re:FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer... by pabs3 on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @03:20AM (#47499496)
> the device will only boot the vendor's signed firmware

That sounds like what Software Freedom Conservancy would call a GPL violation:

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...

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Re:FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer... by kogepathic on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @03:31AM (#47499558)
> That sounds like what Software Freedom Conservancy would call a GPL violation

Sure, it is. So what? Have you got 200k for lawyers and years of your life to spend in court fighting over it?

I have personally contacted the SFC with ample evidence of deliberate and wilful GPL violations, such as providing a written offer for source code and then ignoring or flat out refusing requests for the source code. The SFC has acknowledged the vendors are violating the spirit and letter of the GPL.

Nothing happens. The SFC is one organisation with limited resources, FOSS developers don't want to spend their time in court, they'd rather develop software. Vendors know 9 times out of 10 they will get away with the GPL violation scot-free.

It's fine to put on your rose colored glasses and pretend GPL forces companies to release source code. Reality is, the vendors have a larger marketing budget than the entire SFC endowment and the vendor's legal team is happy to tar-pit requests ad infinitum.

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Re:FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer... by anthk on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @02:14PM (#47506852)
Nothing happens my as, until your company gets sued by the FSF and your reputation online gets to the dustbin.
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Re:FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer... by pabs3 on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @10:39PM (#47512542)
The FSF doesn't sue companies generally, they don't have the resources for that.
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Re:FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer... by pabs3 on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @10:38PM (#47512537)
It is definitely true that any license including the GPL requires effort and resources to enforce, and that almost all authors of GPL software don't have enough of those.

If the SFC lawsuit against Vizio succeeds, then there will be another option; since yourself and others are third-party beneficiaries of the contract embodied in the GPL between Linux kernel developers and hardware vendors that ship Linux; start a class action with other users of the hardware where GPL violations are present, and sue for GPL compliance instead of money. The lawyers will get their legal costs presumably and the users should get source code. Probably some law firms would take this on just for the legal costs, especially if the Vizio precedent makes it easy to win future cases.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

PS: I don't think SFC have an endowment, they are just directly funded by people who support their goals.

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Re:FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer... by pabs3 on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @10:41PM (#47512555)
PS: another tactic I have seen applied for GPL enforcement is for the copyright holder to have customs block devices on import since they contain illegally obtained software. This is pretty rare, but can be effective.
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