Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer and leader of Linux, is leaving his job with Transmeta and taking a position with a consortium developing the Linux operating system for corporations.
Linus Torvalds To Leave Transmeta
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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AAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
Yeah. It’s like when people noun verbs!
All the fuzz about DRM in the comments.
If you are an honest person using no warez you have nothing to worry about.
I’m coming over to install a camera in your house. Don’t worry if you’re honest you don’t have anything to worry about.
And we can ban free speach because that only protects people who say nasty things, and those that don’t don’t have anything to worry about anyway.
Freedom is it’s own reward, you have it despite people abusing it. It’s very easy to sign away, but enormously hard to regain.
Ok, let’s say you have a new shiny PC, DRM enabled : it means it contains one of those beautiful Fritz chipsets, that only let DRM licenced systems to run on it. If Linux is DRM enabled, a distro provider still have to get a licence for a specific build of the kernel. You can bet that this licence will only be delivered if the kernel is fully supporting DRM (not as a dynamic module, but statically linked).
That means that any software will have to be DRM friendly to be runnable on such system. Thinking about circumventing DRM ? If you live in US, it’s a crime (DMCA). And the way things are going in Europe, it might become a crime there too.
Ogg Vorbis, Xvid, OpenOffice, Freenet you say ? To access a DRM enabled hardware part (say the soundcard, or simply the Hard Disc), your software will have to be certified by DRM certification providers, or die.
And who will provide the licences/certifications ? Microsoft ? Intel ? The RIAA ? The MPAA ? Governments ?
Besides the fact that you’ll need to shell out big bucks to get a DRM licence or certification, just doing something subversive – from the licence provider point of view (like some free implementation of an encryption scheme) could be sufficient to forbid you from getting any certification at all.
In the highly unprobable case that someone get a DRM licence key to be incorporated directly in the Linux source (like Linus is suggesting), how long will last its validity ?
And this is just for Linux : do you seriously believe that all these nice little OSes that fill up everyday news of your favorite website will survive the DRM revolution ?
Goodbye *BSD, BeOS spin-off, MorphOS, not to mention the frequent articles about OS writing…
>>>If Linux is DRM enabled, a distro provider still have to get a licence for a specific build of the kernel. You can bet that this licence will only be delivered if the kernel is fully supporting DRM (not as a dynamic module, but statically linked).
You are think the other way around. 99% of RedHat’s customers bought the cheapest version and not the enterprise server version.
If linux kernel has TCPA (and it’s disabled at default), and Oracle’s software requires TCPA enabled with a valid TCPA key — and if RedHat only provides a valid TCPA key to their enterprise server version customer, then everybody have to ditch the cheap version and buy RedHat enterprise server version.
That’s why RedHat and company is secretly smiling at the prospect of TCPA. RedHat will still observe fully GPL rules because the TCPA codes are available in the main source tree — you can still compile the OS, but you can’t operate TCPA without a valid key (which RedHat is the only one able to give you for a RedHat TCPA-enabled distribution).
I don’t understand the implication of Oracle software forcing everyone to get a TCPAed system : do you mean that once a couple of customers have one, others has to follow ? why ?
Besides, is it a key, or a signature ?
A key could be used for anything, once available unencrypted. While a signature is bound to a single build, which makes having the kernel source code useless except for review.