Re: Microsoft's plans to kill open source: TCPA
* Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> [021103 23:38]:
> On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 12:19:44PM -0500, Noah L. Meyerhans wrote:
> > FUD! FUD FUD FUD FUD!!! This is completely all wrong. Recently a talk
> > was given at MIT by one of the designers of Microsoft Palladium (their
> > trusted computing initiative) at MIT. I was at the talk, which received
> > lots of coverage on sites like slashdot and arstechnica.
> I reel at your credulity, sir. No less a personage as Steve Ballmer has
> described FS/OSS as "enemy number one", or words to that effect.
> Microsoft has bent its every division to a single goal in the past; it
> would be foolish to assume that they aren't doing so this time.
I'm guessing that someday that TCPA disabled-ability could go away much
now Microsoft has slowly made sure 'Per Connection' type licenses erode
into 'Per User/Per Seat' licenses. (See: Terminal Services licensing for
Windows 2000)
Someday the only option will be that, if not only for the reason of
non-TCPA hardware not having legit reasons for existing. In a world
where most everyone is expected to be a consumer, and the consumer is
best utilised as an income source via restrictive hardware, and perhaps
the only software avaliable is for restricted hardware enablers like
TCPA, why bother making full featured hardware for a small percentage of
the market that isn't consumers? It should be quite easy at that point
to institute some 'developer' fee such as the console manufacturers do
to get the 'development' hardware that costs some horribly insane amount
of money.
Luckily, if this happens to x86 some day, everyone in 'Free' communities
will have a damn good reason to leave this platform in droves. :) I
doubt PPC will ever have this sort of issue.
Of course, perhaps some other x86 platform companies (I think AMD is in
the TCPA ring, right?) would most likely come up with some cool hardware
to fill the void.
Many users have happily changed licensing and EULA tolerances to use
products that mean a lot to them. I don't think drastic changes in
hardware freedom will change the masses significantly. Heck, worse yet,
perhaps they can filter in some security misnomer-crap at some point to
market it to the masses.
At this point, however, it is in their best intrest to make sure their
technology gets in place to accept the masses without alerting the
technologically knowledgable. TCPA could easily become better 'law'
than anything based on mass acceptance and market forces.
--
Scott Dier <dieman@ringworld.org> KC0OBS http://www.ringworld.org/
"Many voters assume that their political leaders are hard at work on
these issues. They are not."
_Editorial: Time to choose / Who will deliver on transportation?_
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/3367890.html
Reply to: