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What's the fuss about?What's the fuss about?Posted Sep 11, 2003 17:25 UTC (Thu) by zonker (guest, #7867)In reply to: What's the fuss about? by simon_kitching Parent article: An opening for OpenOffice.org Ok, for large corporates who mandate use of DRM for internal documents, that will lock non-windows PCs out, but those corporates typically don't allow users to choose their own desktop os anyway. Ah, yes... but those same corporations will probably require DRM for some or all external documents -- thereby forcing freelancers, suppliers and partners to adopt Office 2003 Professional as well. If they'll be doing more than just reading those documents, they'll be forced to adopt Windows 2003 Server as well so they have authoring capabilities. (I think... I'm not sure if you can edit an IRM-encrypted document, even with permission, without the RMS stuff in the back-end.) I feel really sorry for some freelancer who has to invest in Windows 2003 Server just to send a few documents back and forth. As a writer who works with a number of publishers, I have been able to get by with StarOffice/OpenOffice thus far. I don't see any publishers requiring IRM, but I also work with companies doing bits for internal newsletters and so on -- so I can easily see a day when they want to forward documents that are IRM-restricted for me to use as background material. If you can't envision this scenario, you haven't worked with enough corporations. I don't, quite frankly, care whether other people use Windows or Mac OS X or OS/2 or *BSD -- so long as I have the ability to do my work and funtime activities using Linux. When a technology threatens my ability to choose the platform I work on, I get concerned. IRM/RMS is a major threat to my ability to choose. That's what the fuss is about.
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What's the fuss about? Posted Sep 16, 2003 23:27 UTC (Tue) by simon_kitching (guest, #4874) [Link] I have worked for/with many large corporations (IBM, Hutchison3G, Orange, Vodafone, Telecom New Zealand, New Zealand Post) as both employee and external consultant, so am familiar with business practices and attitudes at these sort of corporations.I really cannot see any great incentive for managers receiving documents to require DRM. As the sender, you can send out as many copies of a document as you desire, so sending it via DRM does not guarantee that the document cannot be "leaked" by the sender, only that it cannot be leaked by the recipient. In addition, to extend your "newsletter" example, the recipient must be able to access the data in ways incompatible with DRM (copy/paste into a larger document for example), so they clearly would not ask for DRM'd documents that remove their right to perform such operations. I can see people wanting to send DRM documents; management seem very fond of "for your eyes only" type distribution. The "background material for newsletter" case is a good example. However in order for this to work:
I can't see (a), (b) and (c) being widely implemented even in windows-centric companies. It certainly violates the corporate security policy at many of the places I have worked at or with. As I said in my original posting, DRM for internal use is a different issue; it would be far easier to configure and therefore is more likely to be used. If DRM support was required of external parties in order to perform consultancy work, I would indeed be concerned. However I am far from convinced that the DRM implementation being introduced by Microsoft is going to cause that.
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