How Sun's 'Open DRM' Dooms Them and All They Touch

["Fergie" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

Via Boing Boing.

[snip]

David Berlind has written about Sun's "Open DReaM" crippleware project, a DRM that pretends to be "open source" and an 
"open platform" in a cynical bid to curry favor with copyfighters and studios. The gimmick is that Sun's technology has 
to be run as signed code on trusted computing hardware, which means that while you can see the code, you can't change 
it, improve it, or build on it.

Once you have code you can't modify on hardware you can't access, "open source" can't be meaningfully used to describe 
a project. The key to free and open source software is the right of users to understand, modify, and distribute their 
changes to the tools they use -- to continue a tradition as old as the Enlightenment and as fundamental as the 
scientific method.

Sun's project doesn't subvert DRM, it subverts open source. It complies -- barely -- with the letter of older OSS 
definitions, while gutting their spirit. It's a car with the hood welded shut, with an "open" engine underneath the 
welding-seam.

This is a betrayal of the OSS community by Sun, which should know better.

[snip]

Yet more here:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/14/how_suns_open_drm_do.html

- ferg


--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg () netzero net or fergdawg () sbcglobal net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/


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