[ I've pruned the giant list of innappropriate and off-topic CCs ] On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 11:57:51PM +0100, Hauke Goos-Habermann wrote: > Microsoft plans to kill all OpenSource software on hardware level. This > technology is called TCPA. 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. Palladium and TCPA will *NOT* kill open source. I am going to repeat that, because some people are too thick-headed to understand. Palladium and TCPA will *NOT* kill open source!!! One of the absolutely fundamental restrictions on Palladium is that *all* software that runs on non-Palladium system *must* run on Palladium systems. Remember that backward-compatibility is the only reason MS has been able to sustain their monopoly. You can still run software written for the IBM XT on your WinXP boxes. Microsoft cannot throw that backward compatibity away, and they know this. Hardware support for Palladium will be user-configurable via a BIOS setting. It can be completely disabled. The only negative thing I see comming out of TCPA is that content producers (Hollywood, etc) will release copies of their movies/music/whatever for download in a format that can only be accessed on TCPA systems. This is the major threat. Personally, I would not be bothered by this. However, some people might. For this, I think the only way to prevent this is to get lots of people to either refuse to use Palladium or run systems that don't support it. If the content producers can say "well, we'll happily give up the potential customers on Linux, MacOS, UNIX, whatever if we can get all the Windows Palladium users". They'll only be able to do this if the population of non-Palladium-using people is small. There are other negatives to palladium that I certainly dislike, but I think the above is what's going to be most noticable by users initially. Palladium is really more about protecting the "rights" of copyright holders. You'll be able to run whatever software you want on it. In fact, aside from potential patent issues, I didn't hear anything at the talk that would prevent anyone from writing an open source implementation of the Palladium Nexus (which is the DRM pseudo-OS that runs aside the normal OS kernel). noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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