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

Larry McVoy
2003-04-28T23:57:00Z

On Mon, Apr 28, 2003 at 11:16:00PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
[How he knows more about the law, and everything else, than I, for one, do]

Look, Alan et al, you keep wanting to make this a BK thing and/or tell me
how I've got my head screwed on wrong and I'm finding it a bit tedious.

The point you are missing, utterly and completely, is that I am someone
who has been a member of this "community" for a long time and I'm also
running a business. There aren't a huge number of people doing both
and there is even a smaller number willing to waste their time trying
to help out on this list.

I have a pretty good idea of how you look at things and I am developing a
pretty good idea of how businesses look at things. That might be useful
to you, in one person you have access to both perspectives. If I tell
you that businesses will look at things a certain way perhaps that should
have a little more credibility than Microsoft telling you how their new
feature is for your own good. Then again, given the response, maybe not.

I've tried to tell you how the businesses will see things because that is
information that you might not already have and their actions can cause
you grief. You make plenty of noise about how you hate the corporate
things that they do yet when I try and explain why they are doing those
things, from their perspective, you shoot the messenger.

This constant "I know how the law works and you don't" is no match for
"Microsoft has enough money to change the law". There was this little
anti-trust case, maybe you heard of it, it was obvious that they should
have lost and they didn't. How does your opinion, which would clearly
have been that they should have lost, reconcile with the fact that they
didn't lose? I don't get it, you apparently see something I don't.

What makes it frustrating is that I used to share a lot of your opinions
but in the process of running a business I learned a fair amount which
changed my perspective. Unfortunately, you are doing a great job of
directing the discussion away from any of that information. I don't
know what to say to make the information more interesting to you and
maybe I should accept the fact that you don't want to hear it.
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm