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Alternative?Alternative?Posted Sep 11, 2003 4:45 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)In reply to: Alternative? by jamienk Parent article: An opening for OpenOffice.org
There are some alternatives that are undesirable in a free society. Consider the scene in Orwell's "1984" when the interrogator shows Winston Smith a photograph proving that some core piece of propaganda about the state is a lie. Then he burns the photograph, which is the only copy. In the Microsoft fantasy world of perfect document control, the same will be true of all corporate documents: whistleblowers will never be able to prove anything, because all the evidence will disappear at will. Try to communicate something to an unauthorized person, and your computer will rat you out. Every word's origin can be traced, until the corporate CIO pushes the "shred" button. Sounds great, right? Perfect control of all the drones. Public-key crypto can provide some degree of privacy. But to go beyond this to the Total DRM Vision, it means that people won't control their own computers any more; they will take orders from Microsoft file formats.
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Alternative? Posted Sep 12, 2003 4:31 UTC (Fri) by miallen (guest, #10195) [Link] I don't like proprietary stuff like this any more than you do but the "1984" thing is a bad cliche. It's not difficult to just copy and paste the text, retype it, take a picture with your digital camera, take a screen shot, etc. The end product probably won't even work to the degree necessary to truely have control over the flow of information in an organization. This is all just spin to create something "inovative" to sell the PHBs.
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