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

Timothy Miller
2003-04-28T22:36:25Z

Larry McVoy wrote:

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>The open source community, in my opinion, is certainly a contributing
>factor in the emergence of the DMCA and DRM efforts. This community
>thinks it is perfectly acceptable to copy anything that they find useful.
>Take a look at some of the recent BK flamewars and over and over you
>will see people saying "we'll clone it". That's not unique to BK,
>it's the same with anything else which is viewed as useful. And nobody
>sees anything wrong with that, or copying music, whatever. "If it's
>useful, take it" is the attitude.
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Reminds me of Microsoft.

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>Corporations are certainly watching things like our efforts with
>BitKeeper, as well as the other companies who are trying to play nice
>with the open source world. What are they learning? That if you don't
>lock it up, the open source world has no conscience, no respect, and will
>steal anything that isn't locked down. Show me a single example of the
>community going "no, we can't take that, someone else did all the work
>to produce it, we didn't". Good luck finding it. Instead you get "hey,
>that's cool, let's copy it". With no acknowledgement that the creation
>of the product took 100x the effort it takes to copy the product.
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Reminds me of Stallman.

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