Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

Andre Hedrick
2003-04-28T10:27:06Z

Linus,

There is one fundamental problem, and nobody has addressed.

Who will enforce the GPL over DRM violations?
Since it is a blanket over the entire kernel, and you have formally
(for the most part) have authorized DRM, thus one assumes you are the only
one who can pursue in a court of law.

Regardless of what I or anyone thinks, this effective places total
copyright to you. Additionally for you to have a legal position to stand
on, it may be required for one to show you have total authority/assignment
of the entire kernel.

This is only an old man thinking out loud.

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
LAD Storage Consulting Group

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> In article <Pine.GSO.4.21.0304261459210.10838-100000@vervain.sonytel.be>,
> Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
> >
> >Hence the development rate of Linux will go down, since you cannot use your
> >Linux development box running your own development kernel for anything else,
> >since that would require a signed kernel.
>
> Quite frankly, I suspect a much more likely issue is going to be that
> DRM doesn't matter at all in the long run.
>
> Maybe I'm just a blue-eyed optimist, but all the _bad_ forms of DRM look
> to be just fundamentally doomed. They are all designed to screw over
> customers and normal users, and in the world I live in that's not how
> you make friends (or money, which ends up being a lot more relevant to
> most companies).
>
> Think about it. Successful companies give their customers what they
> _want_. They don't force-feed them. Look at the total and utter
> failure of commercial on-line music: the DRM things that has been tried
> have been complete failures. Why? I'm personally convinced the cost is
> only a minor issue - the _anti_convenience of the DRM crap (magic file
> formats that only work with some players etc) is what really kills it in
> the end.
>
> And that's a fundamental flaw in any "bad" DRM. It's not going away.
>
> 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.
>
> This is part of the reason why I have no trouble with DRM - let the
> people who want to try it go right ahead. They'll only screw themselves
> over in the end, because the people who do _not_ try to control their
> customers will in the end have the superior product. It's that simple.
>
> As to the quake-on-PC issue - it's a completely made-up example, but it
> does show the same thing. Nobody in their right mind would ever _do_ a
> DRM-enabled quake on a PC, because it limits you too much. PC's are
> _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.
>
> The place where client authentication makes sense is on specialty boxes.
> On a dedicated game machine it's an _advantage_ to verify the client,
> exactly to make sure that nobody is cheating. I think products like the
> PS2 and the Xbox actually make _sense_ - they make it convenient for the
> user, and yes they use DRM techniques to "remove rights", but that's
> very much by design and when you buy the box 99.9% of all people buy it
> _because_ it only does one thing.
>
> Linus
> -
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