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

Michael Buesch
2003-04-27T17:22:10Z

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On Sunday 27 April 2003 18:59, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 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.

Oh no. My opinion points exactly 180 degrees to the other side.
You can't say: "The whole community is evil" if only a few people are.
And IMHO that are only a _few_ people.
I think most people of the opensource community know exactly about
copyrights and so on and don't violate them.

> 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.

But: They don't illegaly steal bk. They make their own software for
which _they_ own the copyright. I think it is their good right to do so.

> 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.

I see no problem here.
But in the future software patents will prevent it :P

- --
Regards Michael Büsch
http://www.8ung.at/tuxsoft
19:24:16 up 7:31, 1 user, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.07
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