Microsoft's DRM vision [LWN.net]

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 1, 2005 17:44 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Microsoft's DRM vision by emkey
Parent article: Microsoft's DRM vision

Better keep obsessing. That closed-source Linux driver is likely to enforce DRM-like restrictions, and your attempts to work around them might be DMCA violations.

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Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 1, 2005 18:19 UTC (Mon) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Yep.

Which means that we NEED cards with open-source drivers.

It's getting harder all the time.

As far as I can tell, the newest 3D video card that has succesful open-source support is the Radeon 9200. Is that true? Or are there newer ones?

Likewise, I'm not sure what the deal is with wireless cards, and it's very hard to find the information.

The real problem is that the Common Joe and Common Jane do not understand why this is going to be bad for them. I don't quite get why they don't understand; all that talk of "you will be locked out from doing things on your own computer" ought to scare them, but I don't think it's getting much mainstream play. What IS getting mainstream play is how much the MPAA and RIAA claim they are hurting because of piracy, and how much we need to do about it. Very, very, very sad.

-Rob

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 1, 2005 20:21 UTC (Mon) by gurulabs (subscriber, #10753) [Link]

There is now open source support for R3xx based cards such as the Radeon 9600/9800. My laptop has a FireGL Mobility T2 (aka Radeon 9600) and I have been using the r300 DRI driver for a couple weeks now with heavy 8+ hours a day use. Not one lockup or issue at all.

The 3D performance is very very good as well.

Supposedly on the 9800 cards there is one or more hang bugs that are being tracked down.

The driver lived out-of-tree for awhile at http://r300.sourceforge.net/. However, last week or so it was accepted into the official X.org/Mesa trees.

You can get it here now: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Dax Kelson
Guru Labs

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 2, 2005 0:01 UTC (Tue) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Excellent. Good news, thanks. (Especially now that X.org is in Debian, and presumably will get over to testing at some point in the next few months.)

It seems to be following the late-90's trend of "you get support, just later." I remember a period when a whole bunch of laptops got NeoMagic chips, and it became near-impossible to run Linux on a recent laptop without using one of the commercial X servers. Fortunately, that day is past....

I do miss the days when ATI was sending programming information to people writing free drivers.

-Rob

wireless cards

Posted Aug 2, 2005 22:21 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I don't know about video cards, but wireless card info can be found over
at Jean Tourrilhes' site:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/

I recently bought a Zonet ZEW1500 802.11g card, based on the Ralink
RT2500 chip. The driver is under GPL, and is at:
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 2, 2005 2:11 UTC (Tue) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link]

I hope you'll forgive me if I worry more about wether I'll even be able to boot Linux on new hardware five years from now.

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 2, 2005 17:15 UTC (Tue) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link]

But that is the point isn't it? Therefore, the reason why we need to worry about freely licensed open source, in drivers, BIOSes or whatever. If you can't give the thing a tuneup as you go along, it isn't as useful and may be useless.

If we don't work for our Freedom it will slowly be lost, because people with power will mandate that their Freedom is more important than ours.

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 2, 2005 17:32 UTC (Tue) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link]

You're confusing policy with law.

I don't really care if a particular company chooses to only supply non free drivers. So long as those drivers are functional and well supported. It is their right to do so and I will not argue otherwise. And if somebody else wants to go to the effort of reverse enginering a driver and making it freely available then more power to them. The market place will decide which is the more desirable choice.

The thing to worry about is laws that restrict the ability to do that reverse engineering or implament widely desirable features. And shrilly harping on companies to only create open source drivers does not in any way shape or form encourage them to be friendly to our interests. And while they do not make the laws they can either be a friend or an adversary in that battle.

You don't increase choice by eliminating choice. The other side doesn't want to increase choice. Quite the opposite in fact. I don't think it makes any sense at all to emulate them in this regard.

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 2, 2005 21:22 UTC (Tue) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link]

> You're confusing policy with law.

Not sure where that comes from, care to explain?

> You don't increase choice by eliminating choice. The other side doesn't
> want to increase choice. Quite the opposite in fact. I don't think it
> makes any sense at all to emulate them in this regard.

And I wouldn't want to eliminate choice. However, if you choose hardware that requires closed source drivers, that will become the status quo. And I would expect the hardware manufacturers to start saying; we tried offering open source drivers but our customers seemed to prefer closed source, so that is all we offer now.

Thus you will eliminate the choice by default. I made no statement regarding "shrilly harping on companies...", the point is to buy hardware from companies that offer open source drivers and politely request the same from those that don't. Those that don't, can be made aware that you would like to buy their products if they would provide maintainable drivers at some point, at least.

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 3, 2005 0:49 UTC (Wed) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link]

My point was that it would be far better for people to concentrate on legal issues and less on harassing vendors.

I'm not worried about DRM per se, I'm worried that it will be legislated as mandatory. That is the poisen pill Microsoft is hoping for in regards to Linux, at least as we know it.

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 3, 2005 17:57 UTC (Wed) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link]

And I believe we would generally agree. For instance, I respect copyrights therefore I don't download material that I believe would be against copyright law for me to have. The problem with the DRM is that it potentially infringes rights that we should legally have, basically fair use rights. DRM also punishes all of us for the actions (or lack of action) of others. The problem is that the interface between software and hardware can be used to cause the same types of problems. For instance, it isn't acceptable to stop maintaining proprietary drivers, causing the hardware (that would be functional otherwise) to become unusable. But that is not the only reason. The bad parts of DRM and other evils can be in the driver code. When I buy a product I want to know if it will infringe on my rights or collect my personal information. I don't want to be owned by the hardware companies that I purchase products from.

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 13, 2005 10:21 UTC (Sat) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

I agree with your reasoning but my conclusion is the opposite. Law is easier to fight. Fighting policy is next to impossible, and must be done now before there is a problem.

The comparison with non-free 3d drivers is a good one. Yes, the market would decide -- if the consumers had a choice in the first place. You would expect with so many million Linux users that there was a market for well documented graphics cards, but we haven't seen one in almost ten years. There is no such thing as the freedom of the consumer.

Another more closely related example is the DVD. Yes, it was a bad first try from the movie industry but still causes no end of grief since you can't install a Linux distribution and watch your movies right out of the box. The Linux-on-Xbox project was a superhuman effort just because Microsoft did just a little bit better. Expect it to be close to impossible if they do a good job next time.

I say go after the manufacturers. Let them know right in advance that we're not interested in crippled hardware. Otherwise we'll soon find ourselves up to our knees in cheap but crippled hardware, and even if there still exists expensive but non-crippled hardware, we both know what everybody's going to buy.

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 2, 2005 19:08 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

" Better keep obsessing "

You know what ?... you might be intirely right, because it might very well be no alternative!

Noaday, as before, it is very difficult to encounter *independent* hardware reviews with systems running Linux. When MS DRM schemes kicks in heavly it might be almost impossible to run any hardware besides those runned and tested by the Linux development party. In all this there is perhaps a 'force window' to make hardware manufactors open source more of their stuff, but the MS logo and certification policy is build to counter this by requiring a proportional fee, enough for cleaning the competition arena(their speciality) for the big boys and make them comply(what they want), leaving only in dire strait the smaller and almost unheard of the hardware manufactors. Everybody wins in software/hardware arena as prices tend to rise a little, and honest end users on open source with multimedia requirements will be totally screwed!

* i will not be glad to run an almost exact official copy of Linux tree on a Biostar Mobo, would you ? "