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

Jesse Pollard
2003-05-01T12:31:23Z

On Wednesday 30 April 2003 10:55, Jeff Randall wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 08:20:41AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > My point wasn't about theft, it was about reimplementation.
> > I stand behind that point, what I've seen for more than a decade is
> > reimplementation after reimplementation. I'm not saying there is no
> > value to that or that it is illegal or that there are no improvements
> > (compare Unix diff to GNU diff if you want to see some imrovements).
> > There is tons of value in having free versions of useful tools.
> > There is also tons of value in the creation of new work.
> >
> > What I haven't seen is a lot of revolutionary work. All of that seems
> > to come from commercial companies and at a pretty slow pace. There are
> > a lot of false starts, commercial failures, whatever. But a few slam
> > dunks as well.
>
> Mosaic was pretty revolutionary for it's time.. as was Sendmail..
> source was available for both from the start.

Mosaic is/was derived from two sources - gopher for network communication
(derived from network news and/or e-mail) and SGML combined with display only
word processor applications (postscript and pdf previewers).

sendmail was derived from a message routing protocol originally using UUCP,
written to promote research in message routing, and flexibility to reduce the
re-implementation time required on earlier applications. (somewhere there is a
quote from Eric Allman along the lines of "...If I had known how popular it
would become I would have asked for a dime for each installation...")

Neither looked revolutionary at the time.