Slashdot Mirror
Woz on Open Source, DRM
destinyland writes "Steve Wozniak just weighed in on DRM, saying "it doesn't make much sense if these things are going to have DRM forever." In this great new interview, he complains that even now, only six songs on his iTunes playlist are DRM-free. He applauds the Open Source Movement, saying "it's very honorable and it's very good for the customers." He's even considering publishing the hand-written code for the Apple II as a manuscript.
He's also surprisingly non-commital about the iPhone. ("Will word of mouth kill it or make it a hit? Who knows?") He also talks about his favorite pranks, and reveals that "the Secret Service read me my Miranda rights once.""
Woz has this special ability, he is universally liked and respected. Apple fans worship him, while PC fans still respect him. Look at all the other big names in the industry, like Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Torvalds, Schwartz, etc... and there is always something you can find to dislike them for. Not Woz though, nobody dislikes him.
Its too bad he isnt more actively involved in the industry these days. Then again, thats probrably a good part of why he is so liked!
This is really a great interview. It's a bit long, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading the whole thing. I loved hearing about his escapades with the sheets of $2 bills.
To Woz, about Steve and Woz and Apple :"You guys are Adam and Eve of nerds."
Its funny, interesting, insightful and can also be flamebait/troll at the same time.
He applauds the Open Source Movement
Actually, I don't think the Open Source Movement has much contribute to the fight against DRM. Let's not forget that Open Source is just a way of writing software. The Free Software Movement however really fought against DRM, for example the Free Software Foundation launched the campaign DefectiveByDesign.org.
I'm probably going to get lynched by this crowd, but those pranks he boasts about...Half of them I don't really get as being especially clever or even coherent.
Which Secret Service? Is this someone like Major Error, who read my drive?
why is DRM so popular in the US? It isn't as if US culture has anything worth protecting - it's all militarist commercial crap. We should just stop spending any money on the abortion that is our culture - it sucks big-time!
If we really are a country which thinks that Transformers are a worth-while way to spend money and time, we've already lost the plot.
Why don't we all learn Swedish and watch art-house films?
Sorry, I know Woz is a geek god and all that, but I still don't see why he should be let off this one. If you don't think DRM "makes sense", why on earth have you bought so much DRM-d content and so little DRM-free content?
I'm not sure how many tracks I have (I'm not at home to check) but I think perhaps 60 gig or so (legal, I hasten to add - 99% cd rips), but I do know exactly how many DRM-free tracks I have in my library: all of them. There isn't a DRM'd track on my hard drive. There isn't a user account in my name with any vendor of DRM'd tracks.
It's really not very difficult to simply not buy something you think is a poor product or morally objectionable idea, and I don't half get fed up of seeing people complain about <Apple / MS / Walmart / RIAA / MPAA / Nike / Nestle / etc> and in the next breath telling us all about their latest purchase from said company.
And I know what slashdot is like, so if anyone is thinking of arguing the technicality that Woz didn't decry DRM, only "forever" DRM, perhaps they can be ready with the evidence that ITMS DRM is built to turn itself off any time sooner.
Sure, the Apple II was really cool, but that was a long time ago. Come on Woz, quit it with all these pranks and get back into computers!
This is my sig.
I was there at the Valley Fair Apple store, the one which Woz showed up for. I originally was 5th in line, and through events of "holding places for various friends of others" and the generic line shinanigans (reminds me of the one person in the movie theater that says "These 15 seats are saved." WTF does "Saved." mean? In a movie theater you don't have assigned seats) anyhow...
I ended up 20th or so in line. Funny thing is, I think I was the first one to buy an iphone for myself. Almost everyone in line was buying them in quantity to either sell at a profit via ebay (haven't heard of success at that). However, back to my point of addressing Mr. Wozniak.
I realize many of you would consider him a god around here, but nonetheless his arrival was like this.
He arrived around 4am (note that by this time there was a considerable line) before the Apple store opened, and said "I'm Steve Wozniak, and I'm going to be first in line and buy 8 iPhones." What a dick, I would have thought more of him if he had gotten 'to the back of the line' like the rest of the crowd, just like every other regular joe. It's all good.
However... more importantly, one thing you won't see in the articles/blogs..
While he was in line, a 50something year old woman with a macbook tried to enter the store prior to the doors opening, as she was having battery trouble with it. Woz then proceeded to help her troubleshoot her battery issues. When she walked away I asked her, "Do you know who that is?" She responded "No." I told her, "He co-founded Apple..." She smiled, said "Oh, that's nice," and headed home to try again to fix her laptop with Woz's tips.
I did get a chance to talk to him for a minute, and he agreed with me when I asked him if he thought that when apple launches a major product (iPod/iPhone) that the atmosphere is similar to that of the US Festivals he organized in the early 80s. He agreed but added, "Less heat, less music, but the same comradarie and fun atmosphere."
Thought that was pretty slick, once a nerd always a nerd.
your has-to-be-my-way Nazi mentality, or the fact that you got modded up to 4.
Sorry, market cap is an indication of the ability to sell stuff, not the ability to produce good products. In an ideal world, they'd be one and the same, but in an ideal world, communism would work. We don't live in an ideal world, so neither is true.
As far as what Woz contributed: well, first and foremost, he created a floppy drive that could fit in a space smaller than carry-on luggage. In fact, it was smaller than a toaster. And he was able to sell it for less than $1000. You can trace the start of the home computer revolution to his Apple ][ and the small, cheap floppy drive.
I would say Woz was about 10 times more responsible for the computer revolution than Bill Gates, or Microsoft. Gates was a more vicious businessman, and willing to exploit others, even fuck others over; and so his company has a larger market cap.
As far as Gates writing stuff, he was never that great. If you look at the impressive stuff done by Microsoft, Paul Allen was responsible for the heavy lifting up through MS-DOS 3.0. (After he discovered that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were trying to figure out how to get his shares back should he die of his cancer, he left. See what I mean about fucking others over?)
As far as jumping into philanthropy, Wozniak has been all about philanthropy since day 1. Gates didn't get into philanthropy until after he got married. Until then, he kept getting slammed in the press for being a stingy fucker. After it started affecting his image, he started giving money away, often in the form of, get this, Microsoft software. So, he gets to improve his image, and spread the disease at the same time.
Wozniak is ten times the man, and ten times the geek, that Gates is. Gates is more comparable to Jobs than Woz. Paul Allen was more the Woz equivalent for Microsoft.
Woz is easy to respect, as he not only was one of the primary forces to kick off the home computer revolution, but he's a nice guy. A bit strange, but nice.
Neither Gates nor Woz is really relevant any more. But Woz was and is the better geek, and the better man.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
This isnt a dating forum you'll have to look elsewhere
blockquote)Get It In Cash (from: The Computer Entrepreneurs) Fairs and exibitions are very important in the computer business - they are where entrepreneurs display their wares and meet their customers. One of the oldest of these shows is the West Coast Computer Faire, founded in San Francisco in 1977 by Jim Warren. Warren tells this story about Jim Egan, booth decorator, who worked the first Faire. "So," says Warren, "these two bearded, hippie, pony-tailed kids in Levis come up to the counter... and here's this old, white-haired guy that's been on the show trail for 20 years, right? Every shuck-and-jive artist in the world has come up to him at one time or another. So these two kids come up and say, 'Hey! You know, we'd like to set up some of these really nice chrome displays to make our stuff look flashy. And Egan says "Fine, I rent them." And the kids say, "Yeah, but we're sort of short of loot. Instead of giving you money, could we maybe give you stock in our company? It's called Apple Computer." And Egan pounds on the table and says, 'Apple Computer? Hell no, man! I deal in hard cash here. You want the displays, you pay the cash!" Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak went ahead and fixed up their own exhibit, and Jim Egan is still in the booth decorating business. /blockquote)
He'd not give it to someone like you, even if he had one.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
...the Woz certainly looks, uh, well-fed. (compared with always-trim Steve Jobs.)
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
People love music and they WILL buy it in whatever form the artists contracts to contain the audio. It's the right of HE who own the material to put in whatever form they want. Usually this is the most sales worthy, but if the pirating of intellectual property through DL of copyrighted material continues with no curve I think it's going to have a very negative effect on artists.
I think it will polarize the music community to some degree, creating a HUGE market for one hit wonders and very small market for the actual cutting edge musician who's sound is unlikely to be realized at first.
Being a computer nerd and musician I think you can see there IS a legit need to at least control music piracy. Usually when one cannot enforce a law the last resort will be to rely on education, but in this case I just don't see the population quickly realize that DL all their music instead of buying it is in fact a long road to steal profits from the entire music industry and perhaps ultimately taking money from the arts.
I for one think while liberal arts may be directly useless in many cases, indirectly it shapes out culture and makes us better people. The instant delivery of media, especially free media, has the advantage of expanding the listeners minds FOR NOW, but what is there really is a negative impact on artists from people stealing their works. In a much bigger picture it could help contribute to the downward spiral that is American culture. American and the industrialized countries at least should be paying for MOST of their music. It's just not that expensive and the profits do without a doubt perpetuate the music industry.
While they can adapt their models somewhat and profit less from CDs and more from merchandise and concerts, that's still a negative effect.
So while slashdotters hate DRM, is it because it's make free music harder to get or simply because a few people wind up getting ripped off and losing their songs. I bet it a little bit of both, which means, the world needs a better DRM. One that is fair and effective because stealing content HAS to have some negative effect on our artists. Our people might get smarter or more cultured though information theft, but what happens in 100 years when the numbers of truly passionate artists decline even more.
You cannot deny that the vast majority of great works are made be an tiny fraction of the people. So the effect of discouraging their production through theft could be much greater than you might at first assume. It IS a problem people and while DRM wasn't the answer I don't think making media easy to steal is a reasonable solution either, which happens to be the case currently. Google videos compromise is MUCH more realistic but it still winds up censoring a ton of material production companies can pull massive amounts of content whenever their contracts expire.
How can people be truly inspired to create art if we have no realistic means to stop everyone from not paying for their product. I mean being a pure artists who cares not about profit is great, but MOST artists BY FAR are just doing their jobs.
Perhaps the easiest solution is for the media companies to buyout the P2p providers and make money through advertising and having their client run on your PC. For that matter the client could run P2P DL free music legally and also use your extra CPU cycles for whatever profitable endeavor the companies can think of. Plus perhaps move the bar up a little and get us to a more lossless audio standard. Give away the majority of music perhaps (since they can't stop piracy) and charge for the newest songs.
I think they also need a national organization to manage things such as DVD encryption standards because the companies waste years arguing over specs and by the time their content actually hits the market the encryption is already cracked. Rather than this media control process be controlled by individual companies it should be done be one centralized non-profit organization. They would be the ones to decide what
Whether you're an Apple fan or not, Wozniak is just a great hearted and life filled individual. Wish we had more people like him in this field or world for the matter, it would be a better world.
He arrived around 4am (note that by this time there was a considerable line) before the Apple store opened, and said "I'm Steve Wozniak, and I'm going to be first in line and buy 8 iPhones." What a dick
[...]
While he was in line, a 50something year old woman with a macbook tried to enter the store prior to the doors opening, as she was having battery trouble with it. Woz then proceeded to help her troubleshoot her battery issues. When she walked away I asked her, "Do you know who that is?" She responded "No." I told her, "He co-founded Apple..." She smiled, said "Oh, that's nice," and headed home to try again to fix her laptop with Woz's tips. 1- Gods don't stand at the back of the line, they lead their people
2- Had he been in the back of the line, that little old lady would not have had help with her laptop from a bonifide Geek God of macs.
She especially wouldn't have much luck getting the attention of the mac geniuses in an iPhone stampede. By using his geek god status, he was where and when he needed to be to help the meek. It's a miracle!
You can't take the sky from me...
Typically, because they want it, and can afford the price.
Not every act of purchase is meant to express political support.
When I was reading the article, I thought, "these must be old person pranks." I've seen other older people pull the same kind of stuff; stuff that isn't particularly funny, or convincing, like "pull my finger."
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
You're off on the wrong foot right from the start in that article. You write "It's the right of HE who own the material to put in whatever form they want." which is true, but it's got nothing to do with copyright, or DRM, or anything else.
Copyright is fundamentally very simple. It's the right to make a copy.
In practice that's pretty complex, because... what's a copy? If you decide to get really technical, when you read a book or listen to a song, you're making a copy of it. It's low fidelity, unless you've got an unlikely good memory, but by your logic an artist should have the right to sue you if you hum the time or recite the story in public. Oh, I'm sure that you wouldn't go that far... but it's where the logic leads.
Copyright law is complex because copyright law is mostly about defining EXACTLY what a copy is. And when a copy is subject to copyright. There's been licenses on software that are based on the theory that you're making a copy of the software when you install it on your computer, but there's nothing about copyright restrictions preventing you from making a temporary copy of the images in a video when you play it on your TV. Unless you do it in a public place... then it's a performance. And you're allowed to make a personal copy of a movie off your TV if it was broadcast, which is a kind of public performance though your playing it isn't, or even if it's on a DVD... but not if you're playing it from a rented DVD, whether it's a public performance or not, and not if you're seeing it in a movie, which is another kind of public performance.
So, first off, while an artist has a right to use whatever format they want, that doesn't mean you don't have the right to make a recording in another format... for your own use. Apple got attacked for their "RIP, MIX, BURN" advertising campaign... but it turns out that in the US it's legal to "RIP, MIX, BURN". And it's legal to do that even if the music was DRMed to begin with.
So that's the second thing. The main reason for DRM is to try and create new rights. The DMCA is a really useful tool, because it makes it illegal to use "technical means" to bypass DRM. So while the law doesn't say that an artist has the right to prevent you from making a personal copy of an HD DVD, they're *creating* that right by gluing together bits of the law. This kind of thing happens all the time, the law says one thing, someone comes up with a way to make it mean something else, and sometimes the law gets changed to say that the other thing is really in there, or it gets changed to say the other thing was an unintended side effect and it's really OK to eat peanuts on church after all.
This kind of thing also ends up making the definition of a "copy" trickier.
And people aren't stupid. They look at the way things work, and they look at DRM, and they go "you know, you're treating your fans like shit". So they either treat the artists like shit in return, or they decide they don't like the music enough to put up with being treated like shit. So there's actually competition, and market forces, and all that America and Apple Pie stuff, and what it does it makes DRM into something that provides an advantage for the artists who don't use it. Particularly the ones who aren't selling that well, yet... so they put stuff out that's not restricted, and people discover it, and they go "hey, this is good stuff", and they go "hey, this guy is cool", and they buy his stuff. And there's guys who've made it this way.
And these artists aren't signing with EMI. So EMI's not getting their cut, so this gives EMI a reason to go DRM-free... maybe they can sign a few of the hot new internet artists who'd otherwise be going through CDbaby and eMusic and getting earplay through last.fm. Because, you know, the Internet isn't going away.
I hate the "Napster clones". I think Napster should have been slapped down HARD, right off, because their whole business model was deliberately about setting up cutouts so they could get a cut of copyright violati
Without Richard Stallman we would still have Linux. Without Linus Torvalds, we wouldn't.
Without Richard Stallman Linus would have had to use another compiler, of which there were at least three available at the time. Without Richard Stallman he would have used a different license, but that wouldn't have kept people from joining up to work on Linux... using a different license didn't keep people from working on BSD, and it didn't even keep people from working on Minix... which wasn't freely redistributable by any means.
Heck, without William Jolitz we might not have had Linux. Jolitz redirected a lot of the interest in BSD Net/2 and BSD Lite into 386BSD for a couple of years, and never went anywhere with it. Linus has written that if the fully open-source BSD had been ready even a year sooner, he would have worked on it and there wouldn't be a Linux. But there might have been a better BSD... because a lot of the reason Linux was developed so effectively early on is that Linus is a genuinely nice guy, as well as a good project leader *and* technically competent.
But either way, there were multiple projects and source trees developed duing the '80s that would have produced the same kind of open source environment we have now, with or without Richard Stallman. The details might have been different without him... it's hard to say... but the idea that he was *necessary* for any of this? No.
Woz never ceases to blow my mind. (Story of Mel link for the uninitiated.)
--> I would be surprised if Ellison was loved by anyone.
I'm not up-to-date on Larry, but way back in 1997 as wife #4 was on the way out, Larry went on Oprah trying to lure wife #5. Predictably Larry got a lot of resulting dates. I wonder how Larry's doing lately?
http://www.oreview.com/9703larr.htm
"And while Gates recently married his first wife, Ellison recently divorced number four - and let Oprah Winfrey know on live TV that he is looking for number five." My-ESM (Electronics Supply Manufacturing)
---
um, well off-topic, actually I did hear on NPR this morning larry is hoping to lure the winning New Zealand TEAM that piloted the Swiss boat to America's Cup victory; well he wants them to work for him now.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Bravo!
I'll just add as a comment about the grandparent: historically, the patron was dealing with the artist or, perhaps with an intermediary who got a small cut, not an intermediary organization who offered a minute fraction to the artist.
Artists with passion and the skills to execute will find success, albeit not necessarily commercial success. Ask most musicians who play classical or other non-pop music. But they can achieve success enough to further fuel their passion.
Does piracy commercially stifle more artists than the lack of access to mass media outlets? In other words, who does more damage to individual artists as a class - pirates or media companies?
Gates was a more vicious businessman, and willing to exploit others, even fuck others over; and so his company has a larger market cap.
And is it by any coincidence that he's giving it all away before he meets his maker? I think not. I'd dump that blood money as well if I had his karmic debt.
Good use of one's time? Why would he have to make good use of his time? He's stinking rich. At least he's not spending his time trying to make his mountain of money even bigger.
For the record, I thought the waitress story was hilarious, and good-natured. He wasn't making fun of her as much as he was making fun of himself.
Sorry, I know Woz is a geek god and all that, but I still don't see why he should be let off this one. If you don't think DRM "makes sense", why on earth have you bought so much DRM-d content and so little DRM-free content?
Same reason as everyone else. Buying music from the iTMS is the path of least resistance. It's easier than buying CDs, and it's certainly easier than trying to find the music you want in a DRM-free shop, and it's also easier than downloading it from a P2P network.
Yeh, licenses that limit redistribution, or limit redistribution of modified code, are the kiss off death for projects. One of the things that made UNIX really successful in the academic community early on is that so long as your school had a compatible source license you could get other people's distributions and work with them. That's probably why the BSD license is so liberal.
But this isn't something that's really all that different now. There's still packages that have licenses like that, like qmail. They're a huge roadblock to wide acceptance. Of course both the Minix and Qmail authors also have authors who have very strong opinions on technical subjects that are more important than the broadest distribution to them. But there have been open source projects inspired by UNIX that *don't* have those kinds of restrictions all the way back to the '70s. If we had good cheap 32-bit personal computers with MMUs in 1980, then we'd probably be using a descendent of MINT or OMU or the Software Tools VOS...
For the record, I really like and respect Linus.
But at times he can be very terse. He can be funny at the same time, but make no mistake, he can be very terse.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's not a miracle. The guys in the store knew there was a customer with an easily troubleshootable problem coming, so they used the Woz Phone to call Woz. Woz then proceeded to press the secret button hidden in a bust of the last Pope (given to him by Henry Kissinger) to open the bookcase containing the sliding pole that leads to the Woz Cave. One short trip with the Wozmobile and a dose of Woz Instant Macbook Knowledge Pills later he was ready to solve her problem and the day. Those who were at the line will fondly remember the action-packed problem solving scene, complete with Diagnose! and Solve! captions appearing out of thin air.
Nanananananananananananana-- WOZMAN!
Yes, that is what goes as "funny" when you're sleep-deprived.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Woz wants to write a manuscript on the Apple II code he wrote by hand.
It would be interesting to see how an OS and ROM were written in the "Salad Days" of Microcomputers.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Nanananananananananananana-- WOZMAN!
Yes, that is what goes as "funny" when you're sleep-deprived. I might need coffee, 'cause that made me laugh
You can't take the sky from me...
BSD was given a free license due to Stallman and the FSF's efforts. You can't argue that BSD's example would have influenced Torvalds to have opened up Linux, or that its free license would have had him contribute to BSD instead of his own system, as those contingencies are still results of Stallman's campaigning. Stallman set that golden standard of Free Software, which in turn triggered the so-called Open Source Softwre movement.
Without Richard Stallman, BSD would still be the full property of Berkley, and we would all be using non-free systems and software. Linux would have died in its early stages, having been little more than an interesting school project. Without Linus Torvalds, we would be in a relatively similar boat, running BSD-based systems in place of Linux-based systems.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
How can Stallman be the reason for free software, when there was a thriving free software community before he even started penning the GNU manifesto? The first free (as in speech) UNIX environment was released by Bell Labs in the '70s, as a set of libraries and a Ratfor compiler under the name "Software Tools". The Software Tools virtual OS eventually became a very comlete hosted UNIX environment for the minicomputers and mainframes of the '70s and early '80s. The first free (as in speech) C compilers were published in the late '70s by Dr Dobbs' Journal, and developed for over a decade - I did a port of one to the 6809 in 1983.
BSD was given a free license due to Stallman and the FSF's efforts.
Um, that doesn't happen to be the case.
The reason that USL backed down on the USL-CSRG lawsuit was to cut a cross-licensing knot: System V was using BSD software in violation of AT&T and USL's contracts with UCB (they didn't provide proper attribution for the components they used), and they decided to cut their losses while they still had something to sell to Novell.
The FSF wasn't in the picture, their attention was all on their own HURD project... in fact the FSF was strongly opposing the BSD license, and it's still opposed to the kind of unencumbered release of software that the BSD license represents. They denigrate their *own* library license (and they renamed it to the "lesser" license later on).
Hell, the FSF's support of Linux was lukewarm at first. RMS seemed pretty ticked off (in print at least) that Linus didn't call his OS "GNU something".
Whether or not the FSF existed, the AT&T-free BSD code base would still have come out, at about the time it did. The AT&T-free release was initiated, carried through, and completed by members and ex-members of the Berkeley Computer Science Research Group, and by negotiations between the Regents of the University of California and AT&T and subsequent owners of the UNIX license.
You can't argue that BSD's example would have influenced Torvalds to have opened up Linux, or that its free license would have had him contribute to BSD instead of his own system
Um, I don't know what you're getting at here. At the time I'm referring to, there was no Linux yet. Linus was still messing about with Minix. Linus has said, in as many words, that if the AT&T-free BSD had been ready a year earlier he would have been using that instead of going on to develop Linux.
Without Linus Torvalds, we would be in a relatively similar boat, running BSD-based systems in place of Linux-based systems.
Er, yes, I already mentioned that too. Without either of them the BSD code base would have ended up in the same place.
Since Woz loves open-sores, he is a fucktard who should go slit his fucking wrists. You should go out and do the same thing fucktard.