Wow, my recent interest in MythTV appears to have been well timed. Apparently, Tivo now forces deletion of certain shows on your Tivo (although maybe it's just a bug; still...) This enables corporations to control what you can record and how long you can keep it. The screenshot of this "new feature" shows the patch is "in the wild" now.

It's funny, I was *just* talking with Kees about this exact thing last night. He had been remarking about how he was impressed enough by MythTV by its merits to justify switching to it; prior to yesterday he had assumed that his switch to MythTV would be "the day that Tivo starts restricting what I can record." So I think for Kees it's now MythTV is not only going to be a neat new thing, but also a necessity of principle.

Thinking more philosophically, I believe it is things like this that doom corporations in the long term. Each time they control, limit, and restrict what you can do, it's like they're contributing yet another feature on the side of Open Source. Each of these are a minor nusance for the consumer, picking off small bits of their freedom in the belief that it will gain the corporation a little more income. However, in reality these removals of freedom may be profitable in the short term, but it also turns people off of their service and motivates them to find easier alternatives. In the long run it results in a situation like we have with Microsoft, where you have a choice between a mediocre product with TONS of restrictions that have crept up on you over the years, and Open Source, that gives you every application you can think of, without all those annoying limitations, and at little or no charge, to boot!

Every time a corporation takes away one of your seemingly minor freedoms, it's like they're pounding a nail in their own coffin.