Vizio Lawsuit

This is based on a post I previously talked on

I just spotted a WAN Show clip talking about a lawsuit against the TV brand, Vizio. Vizio is owned by Walmart Inc. as of December of 2024 after it's acquisition for $2.3 billion. In this short clip, they talk about a lawsuit that Vizio is now facing due to the open-source requirement of Linux distributions.

Vizio TVs run on Linux, a free and open-source operating system (OS). As part of Linux's rules, all OS's built on Linux must have their source code publicly available. According to the article Software Freedom Conservancy v. Vizio BPL Open Source, The Lawsuit That Could Change What Your Smart TV Owes You published to AllAboutLawyer.com on May 21, 2026, "The Software Freedom Conservancy purchased a Vizio TV to develop an open-source version of the operating system that was more customizable and didn’t track users to show them ads." This lawsuit is taking place in the Superior Court of California due to recently being moved forward. The new trial date is August 2026.

What does this mean?

This lawsuit could set a huge precedent for other companies, most doing the same thing as Vizio. As Linus states in the video, it's unclear why they chose to combat Vizio rather than other brands also doing this. If this SFC wins, it's likely that other companies will be forced to do the same, as they likely don't want to see lawsuits themselves. This could possibly lead to open source TV distributions that have ads and tracking ripped out of them.

It's possible, after all, that you don't have to mount a monitor to your wall to escape Roku and Amazon Fire TV from collecting your data. I hope to see this lawsuit go in the right direction and protect the consumer from Big Tech.