DRM is not evil, just useless.

Posted Sep 23, 2006 14:16 UTC (Sat) by mingo (subscriber, #31122)
In reply to: DRM is not evil, just useless. by hummassa
Parent article: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

DRM is not evil, just useless.

yeah, in many cases that is very much true. But stupidity we should punish with our good judgement and with our feet, not with our "machine gun": the license. Also, it might sound nitpicking, but it is not actually immoral for a hardware maker to be stupid. If a hardware maker excludes itself from the enthusiast market for no good reason, it's their stupidity (and it's their financial loss in the end).

(And we should really let the hardware designers decide. While i have a problem with monopolies doing DRM or DRM being utilized to hide GPL violations, I have no problems with DRM if for example the hardware is a laser toy for children and DRM is used to not allow above-spec voltage to be delivered to the laser diodes.)

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DRM is not evil, just useless.

Posted Sep 23, 2006 19:44 UTC (Sat) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link] (4 responses)

Even though I mostly agree with the kernel devs side (complying with the GPL means a "god-given right to source" not a "god-given right to use it on any hardware") - I'd still take issue with "punishing with our feet".

What if all options or alternatives are equally bad, or the good ones start using DRM and "stupid" techniques because the "bad" ones get away with it. The only option we might be left with is to not use any of the alternatives - and even that might not be an option.

Case in point, we used to have quite a few options when it came to graphic cards. There was Matrox, ATI, 3dfx, and others for which you could get open drivers. These days, if you're looking for a graphic card you have no real alternatives. I need a desktop graphics card to do my job. Which one do I choose to "vote with my feet" or even "punish with my feet" - as you put it?

(By the way, I'm not saying nvidia or ATI are doing anything illegal, because after all, they don't distribute Linux with their drivers, they leave the home user to do the dirty deed - not illegal)

With DRM you might eventually get to a situation where there's no non-drm'ed hardware found any more. In a situation like that, there's little point to Free or Open Source software any more. So yes, GPLv3 is a "political" tool to stop such a situation from happening, but GPLv2 was politics too, and imho Linux clearly had benefit from the fact that GPLv2 was a political tool.

I'm not saying GPLv3 is the answer, or that DRM clauses are the right solution, but I do feel like it deserves more than blanket statements and knee-jerk reactions. From an outsider, it seems like the kernel devs haven't really put a lot of effort in participating in the GPLv3 process (which probably has plenty of flaws, but the process is made by the ones contributing to it)

DRM is not evil, just useless.

Posted Sep 25, 2006 6:22 UTC (Mon) by mst@mellanox.co.il (guest, #27097) [Link] (1 responses)

> These days, if you're looking for a graphic card you have no real
> alternatives. I need a desktop graphics card to do my job. Which one do I
> choose to "vote with my feet" or even "punish with my feet" - as you put it?

Consider an Intel graphics card. Running quite well on my Lenovo T60,
with 2.6.18 and no binary drivers.

DRM is not evil, just useless.

Posted Sep 26, 2006 22:15 UTC (Tue) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link]

Well, that's great if you have a laptop, you don't care about good performance, and you don't care about the binary-only intel_hal.so that includes things like macrovision.

If you need a PCI-express card, need to drive multiple screens, can't find one of those mini-DVI cards that plug into your embedded motherboard that of course doesn't come with DVI, or need a bit better performance, you're out of luck.

Even though intel graphics are an alternative, for which I'm really happy and that I really am going to support, it's not always (or even most cases) a viable option.

So punishing with my feet is still hard.

graphics cards

Posted Sep 25, 2006 14:59 UTC (Mon) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link] (1 responses)

I need a desktop graphics card to do my job. Which one do I choose to "vote with my feet" or even "punish with my feet" - as you put it?

i'm using ATI cards with free drivers, or Intel cards. Intel has caught up recently and has put their whole 3D stack under the GPL, see: Intel Linux Graphics . ORG.

graphics cards

Posted Sep 26, 2006 22:28 UTC (Tue) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link]

With ATI the best you can do is an X850, which is in theory still supported with the relatively new R300 driver. I've got a number of R200 and R300-class hardware, but when I look around to replace these there's very little options available to me.

Well, maybe I'm a bit impatient - maybe there will be an effort to reverse-engineer the latest generations too.

However, the question was which manufacturer do I reward for being a good open-specs or open-driver citizen. Considering there's an R300 driver in spite of ATI, not thanks to ATI, I find it hard to justify sending cash their way.

ATI, 3dfx, Matrox and others used to be good, now they're not anymore. Intel is the only "good" one (minus a few tiny niggles), and one I'd recommend in a flash provided they have a graphics product that sort of matches your needs, however it often doesn't.

(I refer to my other post on intel graphics here: http://lwn.net/Articles/201235/ )