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

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 08:43:47AM +1000, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> Larry McVoy writes:
> 
> > 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
> 
> Didn't the web start out as open source?  Certainly it didn't come
> from a commercial company.  And the web is arguably the biggest
> revolution in computing in the last 10 years.

Well, http was from CERN and Mosaic was from a University, right? 
And yes, I'd agree 100% that the Web is absolutely the biggest deal 
in computing in the last 10 years, in fact, I think you could argue
that it is the biggest deal in computing pretty much ever.

On the other hand, Google is probably the most useful way to use the
web at that was absolutely a for profit commercial venture.

And as much as I dislike Microsoft, I'd argue that the middleware layer
that they provide which makes all the windows apps work together is 
maybe even a bigger deal than the web.  Unix has been trying to build
something like that for decades and never has.  Neither Gnome nor KDE 
matches what they have, not a chance.  And the reason is that that 
layer is the computing version of ditch digging, it's not sexy, it's
not math, it's just a pile of grunt work, a huge pile.  And Microsoft
did it and not all the Unix guys plus all the open source guys have
anything remotely as useful.

Don't get me wrong, I think Microsoft as an OS company is the worldest
biggest joke.  Anyone who thinks that socket "handles" are different
than file "handles" just doesn't get the abstraction at all.  It's 
pathetic, amazingly so.  But they got the application support layer 
pretty right or at least very useful and workable.
-- 
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Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm