Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

[Michael Buesch]

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On Saturday 26 April 2003 20:22, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Quite frankly, I suspect a much more likely issue is going to be that
> DRM doesn't matter at all in the long run.
>
> Maybe I'm just a blue-eyed optimist, but all the _bad_ forms of DRM look
> to be just fundamentally doomed.  They are all designed to screw over
> customers and normal users, and in the world I live in that's not how
> you make friends (or money, which ends up being a lot more relevant to
> most companies).

IMHO it's totally impossible at the moment to predict what will happen
to DRM in the future. It can turn the "good" or "bad" way, but nobody
can _yet_ say, which way it'll go. When it's forseeable, it'll be
to late to act against it, if it goes the "bad" one.

> Think about it.  Successful companies give their customers what they
> _want_.  They don't force-feed them.  Look at the total and utter
> failure of commercial on-line music: the DRM things that has been tried
> have been complete failures.  Why? I'm personally convinced the cost is
> only a minor issue - the _anti_convenience of the DRM crap (magic file
> formats that only work with some players etc) is what really kills it in
> the end.
>
> And that's a fundamental flaw in any "bad" DRM. It's not going away.
>
> We've seen this before. Remember when dongles were plentiful in the
> software world? People literally had problems with having dongles on top
> of dongles to run a few programs. They all died out, simply because
> consumers _hate_ that kind of lock-in thing.
>
> This is part of the reason why I have no trouble with DRM - let the
> people who want to try it go right ahead. They'll only screw themselves
> over in the end, because the people who do _not_ try to control their
> customers will in the end have the superior product. It's that simple.

Maybe this is only a local problem to germany (I don't think so :) ),
but almost all people I know don't want to know what their computer
does and how it does it. They only want to "write their e-mails"
or only want to "surf in the internet". They don't care about if
they do it with, or without DRM. IMHO exactly this is the danger of the
whole thing. Most people will accept it, although they are a little bit
snipped in their rights and possibilities.
And they'll accept even more and more and more... .
Another point is, that I haven't found anybody in my environment,
that even knows the words DRM or TCPA. Exactly these persons will
accept it, whether it's "good" or "bad".

But on the other side I think the same way, as you, that DRM has
to go into the kernel.
IMHO that's a little bit sad, because we have no really choice,
because over the time all OSs will include it and than linux can't
survive as an outsider in the same form it "survives" today.

>
> 		Linus

- -- 
Regards Michael Büsch
http://www.8ung.at/tuxsoft
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