Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

viro
2003-04-26T18:28:54Z

On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 06:22:50PM +0000, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> 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.

Not all of them. And they had spawned similar software turds - ask
any sysadmin who'd dealt with FlexLM and its ilk and you'll hear a
_lot_ of horror stories about the induced inconveniencies and breakage.

> _designed_ ot be flexible - that's what makes the PC's. DRM on a PC is
> a totally braindead idea, and I _hope_ Microsoft goes down that path
> because it will kill them in the end.

Wolfram Research is still alive. Remember Mathematica?