From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1030372AbWBAQWt (ORCPT ); Wed, 1 Feb 2006 11:22:49 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S964985AbWBAQWs (ORCPT ); Wed, 1 Feb 2006 11:22:48 -0500 Received: from opersys.com ([64.40.108.71]:46865 "EHLO www.opersys.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S964960AbWBAQWs (ORCPT ); Wed, 1 Feb 2006 11:22:48 -0500 Message-ID: <43E0E282.1000908@opersys.com> Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2006 11:32:02 -0500 From: Karim Yaghmour Reply-To: karim@opersys.com Organization: Opersys inc. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040805 Netscape/7.2 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, fr, fr-be, fr-ca, fr-fr MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Filip Brcic CC: Glauber de Oliveira Costa , Thomas Horsten , linux-kernel Subject: Re: GPL V3 and Linux - Dead Copyright Holders References: <43DE57C4.5010707@opersys.com> <5d6222a80601301143q3b527effq526482837e04ee5a@mail.gmail.com> <200601302301.04582.brcha@users.sourceforge.net> In-Reply-To: <200601302301.04582.brcha@users.sourceforge.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Filip Brcic wrote: > I do too, but I don't think that "To stop it, just don't buy any of it." is > the solution of the problem. It would be a solution if most of the customers > would do so. Exactly. And this may indeed be a case where the non-techies have decided for the techies. The tech community (or part of it in this case) cannot change the world. It can certainly act as a catalyst, and boy has free software been such a catalyst, but there are other forces at play here, including consumers who not care about DRM and those that even understand/ accommodate it. Even if licenses prohibited the use of FLOSS in DRM'ed hardware: where there's a need, there's demand, and where'd demand, there's supply. IOW, we will continue seeing DRM'ed hardware for the foreseeable future, and there's nothing any techie (or software license) can do about it. So, I have to question myself with regards to what use it is to encumber a successful license with draconian runtime restrictions when said restrictions will not solve anything anytime in the future -- especially as said restrictions will not effectively block the use of DRM hardware and corresponding user-space applications as I explained earlier. DRM is something worth fighting, but we need something that attacks the root problem, not its symptoms. In comparison, GPLv2 was indeed successful in that it attacked the root problem of software distribution freedom. How it may leverage that by introducing restrictions on symptoms of another problem still evades me. Karim -- President / Opersys Inc. Embedded Linux Training and Expertise www.opersys.com / 1.866.677.4546