Unix to support DRM [LWN.net]

Unix to support DRM

Posted Dec 13, 2005 23:06 UTC (Tue) by wingo (subscriber, #26929)
Parent article: GStreamer to support DRM

I think the statement that "GStreamer will support DRM" is a bit misleading, inasmuch as GStreamer does not and, to my understanding, will not have any DRM components in it. You might as well say that GTK+ supports supports global warming, if General Motors happens to have any applications based on GTK+.

The thing is, if a distro wants to support decoding Windows Media Video files in a product sold in the US, they need to have the licenses. I don't think Microsoft licenses WMV decoders without the requirement that there be some kind of restrictions management system in place. Ergo if a company (Fluendo) wants to sell a WMV decoder, it has to make an honest attempt at DRM.

That's what Christian is talking about. Not an evil scheme to put some DRM structure deep in the core of GStreamer -- that's stupid on many fronts.

Finally I'd like to mention that I'm frustrated at this juxtaposition of GStreamer and DRM. We've been working crazy hard all this year on the GStreamer 0.10 release. All of the developers are extremely pleased with our current status. But the first thing that LWN highlights is a couple of entries from Christian's web log. I hope that people can see beyond one company's plan to make some money off of the project.

Disclaimer: I do work for Fluendo.

(Log in to post comments)

Unix to support DRM

Posted Dec 14, 2005 3:43 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well to be fair to LWN.. This is the _second_ thing they picked up from the Gstreamer release.

I don't think that it's actually about the gstreamer release much.. it's more about the idea that gstreamer (being free software) can be utilized to restrict freedoms. It's what people have been paraniod about for a while now (with IBM and Sony and such getting more interested in Linux stuff)

The release announcement for Gstreamer 0.10.0 at LWN is at http://lwn.net/Articles/163637/

It's quite unbiased. :)

Congratutions btw. I've been looking forward to this release. Hopefully it solves most, if not all, of the limitations in the 0.8.0 series stuff. (I wonder how long till it hits Debian Sid..)

Unix to support DRM

Posted Dec 15, 2005 12:29 UTC (Thu) by rjw (guest, #10415) [Link]

I think the point is that if codec licensors require a joke DRM scheme now, that is trivially defeated, do you really believe that they *won't* start requiring a hardware assured pipeline at sometime in the future?

At that point, will you throw up your hands and give up?

Or will you incrementally add things at the request of the licensors, to the detriment of the users control of his own machine?

This is a pretty dangerous road to go down, as it sets up an expectation that you will support any arbitrarily nasty DRM scheme that comes along, and some of those *do* require that you architecture is based on user-distrust.

Of course, none of them actually have any security value, but hey, who cares?