Comments on: Linux DRM Warning

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 07:52:11 +0000

Yep, as I said before, freedom is not generally (and should not be) used as a reason to switch to a Mac, though, yes, the core part of it is open source (yep, xnu is another free kernel). Don’t get me wrong, I like the Mac platform and Mac OS X and there are many advantages to it over Windows, but freedom is not one of them.

Trivia: One of the parts of the xnu kernel that is designed for DRM is PT_DENY_ATTACH, which is basically a copy of Vista’s Protected Processes. Often mentioned in the context of, but not limited to, DTrace. But since xnu is open source, it can easily patched out. That made me wonder about the politics inside Apple that are going on relating to open source.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:36:17 +0000

“Non free software should never be thought of as protecting privacy or security.”
Yep, security by obscurity do not work.
“There are always other kernels to use.”
Yes, certainly they are, and in fact competition is a good thing here. In particular, I will mention GNU/Hurd, which did try to upgrade to GPLv3 but not every part can be upgraded because some of the parts have code from Linux and so cannot be upgraded:
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org/msg03105.html
That leads to another quote:
“After reading through the article it makes it even more important that the kernel be moved if only piece by piece to GPLv3. ”
That would certainly help here. It would help with upgrading busybox as well to GPLv3, which is also important.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:40:00 +0000

As this person puts it, "After reading through the article it makes it even more important that the kernel be moved if only piece by piece to GPLv3. The article mentioned only corporate interests, but more importantly is the ramifications of government interests. That is where the real fight will end up being."

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:01:04 +0000

As more users flock to GNU/Linux, a smaller proportion of them will be aware of Freedom. Let’s try to offer a solution by politely debating and educating.

By: Needs Sunlight

Needs Sunlight — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:56:52 +0000

The tolerance of binary blobs in the kernel, or even the distros, is the enabler to the DRM travesty. Go back to disallowing blobs and you have one more barrier to DRM.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/6497

By: twitter

twitter — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:39:33 +0000

Non free software should never be thought of as protecting privacy or security. Giving control of others to your computer only invites others to abuse you. Medical records, for example, need to be under the control of their owners and those who access them for patient care. This is a problem traditional permissions and encryption solve. No one needs TPM modules and other black boxes in their computer.

By: notzed

notzed — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:36:55 +0000

There are always other kernels to use.

Linux is becoming almost like a prorietary platform anyway. Partially because of the license, and partially because of the constantly changing apis, and the allowing of binary blobs and drivers (and particularly because the pc hardware is just so fucked to start with, and needs so much code just to talk to the hardware).

I’ve had more problems than ever lately too – instabilities and hardware not working, so there are perhaps some issues starting to raise themselves. Rather than ‘enough eyes make any bugs shallow’, perhaps it is ‘enough eyes make even crap code work eventually’.

By: Will

Will — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 01:19:33 +0000

If I wanted to use Linux with DRM, I’d just go buy a Mac.