This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, May 20th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know,

give you some important context, and help each other understand. Today, if you want to legally

mod your TV, an eight-year-old battle to open up that

TVOS finally gets, well, it gets a court date. Yeah, they got a date. I'm Tom Merritt.

And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

The Software Freedom Conservancy, or as I will refer to it from now on, the SFC, has spent

eight years trying to get Vizio to release its source code for televisions because the operating

system Vizio uses is based on Linux, which is an open source operating system. They filed

the suit back in 2021. It's now headed to trial, August 10th, in the Orange County Superior Court of the state of California,

to be decided by a jury of our peers.

A lot of TV operating systems, LG's WebOS, Samsung's Tysin, Roku OS are based on Linux.

So the outcome of this trial could have a wide-ranging effect if the FSC gets its way and gets the court to make Vizio release source code in an executable form to any owner who wants it.

If that happens, that would let you modify the code. You could add an

accessibility tool if you wanted. You know, Vizio provides some, but maybe there's one you want that they

don't provide. You could limit the ads in there, something Vizio would not like you to do. You could

deactivate automatic content recognition so you could keep a connected to the

internet, but not feel like you're being spied on. Ars Technic guy has an interview up today with the

FCFC about the case. They asked Walmart, the parent company of Visio for an interview as well,

but they didn't get an answer after multiple requests, probably because they don't want to talk about

the active court case. And Walmart has not been the parent company for all eight years. No, no. Because it was sold to Walmart during this time. That's right. Walmart is the parent company now, which is why they contacted them. But you're right. Vizio is this case has been going after Walmart. The case has been going on so long, yeah, that they changed owners. Vizio's OS is based on Ubuntu, which uses the GNU general public license.

That requires users of its operating system to make the source code available, but with some

exceptions for proprietary apps.

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