Microsoft's DRM vision [LWN.net]

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 2, 2005 17:32 UTC (Tue) by emkey (guest, #144)
In reply to: Microsoft's DRM vision by jstAusr
Parent article: Microsoft's DRM vision

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.

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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.