To think about what free software licences should do about tivoisation, we have to understand what problems we're trying to prevent, and how it works - so that we can ensure that it doesn't work.

How tivoisation works

Tivoisation is a technique that manufacturers use to produce a computer, to sell to you, whose software they can update but you can't.

There are three elements involved in tivoisation:

1. The manufacturer puts a chip in the computer which checks any software before it is run and which will only allow authorised software to be run.