Bonum Certa Men Certa

“DRM is Probably 70% of the Complication in Supporting Open Source”

ATi X800 Pro Core
ATi X800 Pro Core



Summary: RadeonHD driver suffers from Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) which Microsoft and the copyright cartel push into GPUs

"Security as a lock-in" is a famous antitrust exhibit/memo from Bill Gates. It also seems to manifest itself in DRM/TPM, which are not concepts that Gates was ever against (back when he ran Microsoft). He was in favour of them.



“Gates made it explicit that he wanted to screw Linux with undocumented ACPI extensions and software patents”DRM -- whether Gates is responsible for it or not -- is truly harming GNU/Linux in the same way that ACPI does. Gates made it explicit that he wanted to screw Linux with undocumented ACPI extensions and software patents. One person's "security" is another person's exclusion or "lock-in" and one thing that Gates is good at is monopolisation of markets under a thick PR blanket. He has a whole foundation of charlatans doing exactly that.

One of our readers told us this evening that "there were some interesting comments recently in #radeonhd about Digital Restrictions Management being about 60-70 percent of the reason for the hold-ups in the progress of the open radeonhd driver for AMD/ATI graphics cards." The full conversation can be found here (for those who are interested in the finer details).

One person says, "damn DRM, screw it. I have not been using it since its introduction and I still go to live concerts and cinema. :/ I thought the reasons of concealing were lots of hours spent by technician on card design, so it does not get to "rivals" for free. But DRM.. damn. :///"

Bridgman, who is apparently a graphics driver developer, replies with: "DRM is probably 70% of the complication in supporting open source, 3rd party IP is 20%, competitive stuff is maybe 10%"

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