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

Matthew Kirkwood
2003-04-27T22:56:13Z

On 27 Apr 2003, Alan Cox wrote:

[ playing John Humphries today ]

> > But you are still missing the point. As long as the feeling is that
> > it is OK to reverse engineer by staring at the file formats, the
> > corporations will respond by encrypting the data you want to stare at.
>
> And government if it is smart will reply by enforcing reverse
> engineering rights *for compatibility* (not cloning), or business (the
> surviving bits anyway) will figure it out and do it themselves.

Alan -- could you please explain what you see as the real
differences between reverse engineering for "compatibility"
and for "cloning"?

It isn't obvious to me that there is a line-in-the-sand.
For example, a Word document extractor like "wv" is not
nearly as useful without an attached word processor (be it
or not that your intention is to save in that format).

> > In other words, it's pretty much hopeless to try and catch up that way,
> > you might as well go try and build something better from the start.
>
> You have to interoperate to do that.

Is that really true? It may make sense for a lot of
consumer applications, but does it really apply to source
control?

Isn't it the case that sometimes features are more compelling
than compatibility?

Matthew.