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

Alan Cox
2003-04-28T11:50:32Z

On Llu, 2003-04-28 at 00:28, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Under your model, only incremental change will occur, no customer is
> ever going to fund the large amounts required for truly new work.

Or customers do it in groups, or they keep it proprietary. The value
leak of commoditization is slow. I also don't believe in truely new
work. Everything is a new light on a pile of existing technology

Whats BK but a collision between graph theory, CVS and distributed
resolution stuff. The result of that collision is possibly the worlds
best VCS, but its built on a thousand or more years of maths, it
requires the entire science of computer hardware to run, and the
chips it runs on require several thousand years of material science.

On the scale of what it takes to make BK actually useful your work is
but a tiny spec in the big picture, like Linux like all these things.
People seem to lose the picture of the smaller things they rely on.
Remember the subroutine - someone invented that, BK builds on that
knowledge. How about floating point maths, turning machines ....

> The fact that we took that approach is the main reason we're in business
> today, there are literally hundreds of competitors out there, so if we
> are only slightly better do you think anyone would know we existed?
> Not a chance. I'll bet you I can name at least 20 and probably more
> like 200 SCM companies you've never heard of. We weren't interested in
> being number 201 in that list.

Which requires you are not a commodity product. What is funny here is that
open source probably isn't your nemesis. Before open source commoditizes your
market space cheap foreign labour and more tax efficient and business
efficient non US companies will probably do so with cheaper proprietary
applications.

When we first discussed bitkeeper and you talked about licensing issues I
said the same - the GPL generally doesn't fit "best in field", be that
Oracle or BK. It's up to you to ensure the other 200 VCS vendors don't
run you down. Most of them want to be #1 too

Alan