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A Lucid Explanation of Palladium
buro9 writes "Last week on the WMTalk list a heated debate raged on the rights of a consumer to rip their DVD's locally for more convenient playback later. As the debate started to border on a flameware an anonymous user managed to give the most clear description of Palladium and its implications to us as both users and developers."
Pretty interesting article. ;-) MS publicily saying that they will make some association / trustee company, including people from FreeSoftware community, competitors, and so on, which would review software & sign it. Would that be acceptable ?
Even if the poster is obviously against MS & Palladium, (s)he does point out one of the most critical things : MS has to sign everything secured.
Now the question is: imagine (or dream
Though of course having a program / driver signed would prolly require money, and thus disrupt many FreeSoftware projects....
Also interesting the bit on the boss / email, good point to. Needs to be thought really clearly before implementing.
Now of course the big question is whether all those Palladium / security thingy are really required for personal computers. Of course it'd be cool to have the guarantee that the OS doesn't get destroyed by a virus thanks to the built-in safeguards, on the other hand MS's system seems to take away too much from users....
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
I was among the legendary "consumers of computer software at [that] time" and believe me, we weren't all that sophisticated. What we rejected was crap like paying $500 for a software package and then not being able to use it after misplaced the &@^%&! thingamabob required to use OUR OWN software. Resentment, especially among commercial buyers, was great, giving the companies that didn't worry about these things a competitive advantage.
:).
Even now -- and just one example -- the difference between "activating" OS X (press "install") and activating Windows XP is noticed, and this is traded on at my neighborhood Apple Store (more than half their walk-ins are PC users, and they like this stuff). The most restricted product I have is Photoshop, which quite mildly use serial numbers to make sure another copy isn't running elsewhere on the network. Pretty convenient, although easy to hack (post serial #'s on the internet). They are the premier product, yet they do just fine without Palladium.
In my original note, I should have emphasized that huge fraction of "consumers" that are savvy institutional and corporate buyers. They are going to look at Palladium long and hard, and say forget it -- this benefits you far more than us.
What happens down at Best Buy with the newbies won't decide the outcome. For Pd to succeed, everyone needs to sign on, and any holdouts such as Macintosh, not to mention the many millions of legacy machines of all types, will destroy the interoperability the market segments require.
Sure it could happen, but I think it's implausible that it will, and will stake money on that ($50?