Yearslong fight over users' right to tweak smart TV software heads to trial

SFC’s lawsuit alleges that Vizio breached GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 by failing to make available the complete source code for Vizio OS. The case is currently in the Orange County Superior Court of the State of California. The lawsuit targets Vizio specifically, but the impact could extend to other Linux-based smart TV OSes such as LG’s webOS, Samsung’s Tizen, and Roku’s Roku OS.

“We expect all companies who distribute Linux and other software using right-to-repair agreements like the GPL in their products would comply with these agreements,” Denver Gingerich, the director of compliance at SFC, told Ars.

SFC sued Vizio specifically because the group received numerous reports from concerned users about the company’s TVs, Gingerich said. Vizio has shared some of its operating system’s source code, but SFC claims that code does “not include all files and scripts that would permit the code to be compiled into an executable form,” according to its amended complaint from 2024 (PDF).

“As a nonprofit charity with limited resources, we sadly cannot solve every violation of the GPL agreement, but we do work hard to solve those that are important to a wide variety of users, and the popularity of Vizio TVs suggested to us that resolving this case would be especially worth the effort,” Gingerich said.

The terms of GPLv2 say that “[f]or an executable work, 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.”

FSF says there’s “no reason” for code to be withheld

Legal filings from both Vizio and SFC frame the Freedom Software Foundation (FSF) as the authority on the GPLs in question, as it’s the license steward and publisher of GNU licenses, including GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1.