It's not acceptable indeed, and it highlights a very important distinction between MIT/BSD-like licenses and the GPL: GPL license are about USER freedoms. The u

It's not acceptable indeed, and it highlights a very important distinction between MIT/BSD-like licenses and the GPL: GPL license are about USER freedoms. The user of your software. BSD/MIT are more about company/creator freedom. If you use GPL software, it comes with rights: You can request and inspect the source code. It also comes with obligations: You must share any changes you make so that all downstream users know what they'll get. TiVo may not have violated GPLv2, they certainly violated its spirit with a workaround. And thus GPLv3 was born, indeed. TiVo could have done what they wanted using BSD, but they opted for Linux, took the benefits, didn't give anything. Of course, one can find this acceptable, Linus Torvalds seem to think it is acceptable.