Why do distributors only have to provide Installation Information for User Products?

Some companies effectively outsource their entire IT department to another

company. Computers and applications are installed in the company's offices,

but managed remotely by some service provider. In some of these situations,

the hardware is locked down; only the service provider has the key, and the

customers consider that to be a desirable security feature.

We think it's unfortunate that people would be willing to give up their

freedom like this.  But they should be able to fend for themselves, and the

market provides plenty of alternatives to these services that would not lock

them down. As a result, we have introduced this compromise to the draft:

distributors are only required to provide Installation Information when

they're distributing the software on a User Product, where the customers'

buying power is likely to be less organized.

This is a compromise of strategy, and not our ideals. Given the environment

we live in today --- where Digital Restrictions Management is focused largely

in consumer devices, and everyone, including large companies, is becoming

increasingly worried about the effects of DRM thanks to recent developments

like the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista --- we think that the proposed

language will still provide us with enough leverage to effectively thwart

DRM. We still believe you have a fundamental right to modify the software on

all the hardware you own; the preamble explains, ``If such problems [as

  locked-down hardware] arise substantially in other domains, we stand ready

to extend this provision to those domains in future versions of the GPL, as

needed to protect the freedom of users.''