[mdlug] Vista DRM hurts Linux?

[Aaron Kulkis]

Michael S. Mikowski wrote:
> On Thursday 29 March 2007, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
>> Ingles, Raymond wrote:
>>>> From: Aaron Kulkis
>>>>
>>>> I smell dozens of class-action lawsuits on the horizon, the
>>>> end result being that the MS EULA being ruled to be toothless
>>>> in all important respects
>>>  The problem is, MS is greedy, not stupid. I'm sure they recognize
>>> that as a potential danger, and so they have some careful balancing
>>> to do in order to maintain the situation. It's possible to handle
>>> explosives pretty safely if you take care and precautions. For MS,
>>> threatening to 'revoke drivers' is one thing, but actually
>>> *following through* on that would be tantamount to throwing lit
>>> matches around gunpowder.
>>>
>>>  They might end up doing such a desperation move at some point, but
>>> I
>> In which case, the house of cards collapses sooner rather than
>> later.  Either way, they've painted themselves into a corner...
>> with never-drying contact cement!
>>
> 
> 
> Aaron, I'm with Ray on this.  For example, MS has made noise /for years/ 
> about patent infringement by OSS on MS software.  Why, then, haven't 
> they pursued /any/ direct legal action?*
> 
> Because the dirty little secret might be that MS 'proprietary' software 
> probably contains hundreds of bits of OSS code.  It is already widely 
> acknowledged, for example, that nt/2000/xp uses the BSD TCP/IP stack. 

BSD license allows it, but yeah, if you copy the file over to
a unix or linux system, and run strings on it, the Berkely
copyright line (it's compiled in as a static string in all
Berkely code ever since the earliest source code I've seen,
which was BSD4.2 code, which I perused in 1984)


> If they press the attack, they will at least need to open up their 
> source code for scrutiny, and its a legal can of worms from that point 
> forward.  And, of course, this bring more anti-monopoly pressure. 
> 
> So their best defense is Steve Balmer offensively frothing at the mouth 
> about what MS /might/ do (but of course never will).
> 

But with the DRM thing, they HAVE to do it..because they made
promises to the Hollywood crowd that they will take action
against all "offending" hardware....

And at that point, no mattter what choice they make, it's
"the wrong choice" which means, in fact, that setting up the
whole scheme in the first place was the ACTUAL wrong choice...
and since THAT choice has not only been made, but executed,
and released in public... they've pretty well screwed
themselves, because they've placed themselves under legally
binding contracts to disable the hardware at Hollywood's behest.

> Pretty much the same thing with the drivers issue.  The threats will 
> probably have a much larger cumulative effect than any single legal 
> action.  Remember, the school bully almost always gets his lunch money 
> without a fight.
> 
> Cheers, Mike
> 
> * disregard the cloak and dagger funding scheme for SCO; that was never 
> supposed to be discovered.  Besides, the misdirection worked in that 
> the mainstream press never really picked up on it.
>