Re: Why DRM exists [was Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!]

Larry McVoy
2003-04-30T15:08:31Z

On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 10:52:27AM -0400, Downing, Thomas wrote:
> No, I don't think you are 'the world's worst communicator'. First, I was
> not alone in understanding you to say that the open source community as
> a class were prone to theft.

I am too the worst communicator! :-)

My point wasn't about theft, it was about reimplementation.
I stand behind that point, what I've seen for more than a decade is
reimplementation after reimplementation. I'm not saying there is no
value to that or that it is illegal or that there are no improvements
(compare Unix diff to GNU diff if you want to see some imrovements).
There is tons of value in having free versions of useful tools.
There is also tons of value in the creation of new work.

What I haven't seen is a lot of revolutionary work. All of that seems
to come from commercial companies and at a pretty slow pace. There are
a lot of false starts, commercial failures, whatever. But a few slam
dunks as well.

As someone who has extensive first hand experience at large and small
commercial companies and in the open source world, it's my take that
the open source guys are better at the evolutionary approach (faster,
for sure) but worse at the revolutionary approach.

A key point is that you need a baseline to evolve. The open source guys
aren't producing that baseline as far as I can see, the new stuff comes
from other sources. That's not an absolute statement, there are exceptions,
but as far as I can see, it's a true statement most of the time.

Another key point is that it costs a boatload more to produce something
new than to reimplement something and the corporations know that. It
doesn't cost more because they are dumb, it costs more because they have
to try lots of new ideas and only a tiny percentage of them pan out.

So if you were the organization spending the money to produce something
new and you knew that it was going to be copied, wouldn't you do something
to protect that? And if a world wide group of volunteers sprang up and
got well organized and became productive at reimplementation techniques,
wouldn't you be concerned? I think you might. If you were a powerful
corporation, you might lobby Congress for more laws to protect your
works, you might start a "Trusted Computing" initiative to make sure
that the data was all encrypted so that only your programs could access
that data, etc.

> My A produces your B; I don't like B, so I won't A. This seems to be
> your solution.

I'm not sure I've proposed a solution, I doubt it. I don't have a solution,
I'm trying to shine a light on what I see as a problem. I was hoping that
you had a solution.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm