Slashdot Mirror
Digital Restrictions Management in Office 11
conaone writes "According to a Microsoft Watch, there is a feature in the leaked Office 2003 called "Information Rights Management." A lot more control over documents with this... the story says: "Microsoft is threading DRM throughout the Office 2003 suite, allowing restrictions to be set on Outlook mail messages, as well as on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Using "permission templates," document authors can determine restriction policies to be applied to entire categories of documents, according to Microsoft's site." Here's a link to the whole story."
Oh come on, people. This is not Insightful, this is a complete troll.
PGP is a general-purpose encryption tool. It's an open standard with several implimentations, both commercial and not. It is all around great stuff.
Office 11's DRM stuff is NOT an open standard, WILL require millions of users and businesses to re-pay the "Microsoft Tax", and WILL shut out any hope of interoperability with any other office suite by making it illegal, under the DMCA, for other developers to try and reverse-engineer it. It may be USEFUL, don't get me wrong, but for the above reasons, it's pretty damn evil.
It's a pretty clear-cut issue. If RedHat came out with this, or Mandrake, or Debian, the response would be exactly the same, if not even MORE harsh. We expect this from Microsoft, as evil as they are; if a Linux distro tried to pull it, we'd all freak out.
Doug