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Did Mozilla Have No Choice But To Add DRM To Firefox?
JimLynch (684194) writes "Mozilla has been in the news quite a lot over the last few months. This time the organization is being hammered by open source advocates for adding Adobe DRM to Firefox. But did the folks at Mozilla really have a choice when it comes adding DRM? An open source project like Mozilla is not immune to market pressures. And with so many competing browsers such as Chrome adding DRM for Netflix, etc. how could Firefox avoid adding it? Is it realistic to think that Firefox can simply ignore such things? I don't think so and the reason why is in Firefox's usage numbers over the last few years."
Blocking something because RMS does not approve is the opposite of freedom
Nonsense. Choosing not to include some feature in your product is exercising your freedom, unless someone's actually forcing you to do it.
At the end of the day, it will be users who decide between Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, and the multitude of other options out there. These users will make their decision based upon a variety of factors. For some it will be access to DRMed content. For others it will be a completely open source product. Of course there are other reasons too.
I'm guessing that the Mozilla foundation tried to figure out what their user base wanted, and came up with the answer that content would keep more users than excluding the DRM module would. Maybe they are right. Maybe they are wrong. Only time will tell.
As I understand it, RMS has three points:
1) DRM is bad.
2) Firefox implementing DRM is one piece of the problem.
3) Firefox is free to do whatever they want, but if they felt forced to implement DRM, it would have been better if they at least made an effort to warn the users about the risks. Instead they are publicly praising Adobe for their approach to DRM.
People who criticize RMS often don't even know what he said. That is not true of everyone, but most comments on the net are rather clueless about it. DRM is bad, that's not even controversial.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
unless someone's actually forcing you to do it.
"They forced me with money" is the reiterated excuse of some of the most despicable amoral scum.
Just because there's some pressure from the outside to do immoral things, doesn't mean they had to cave in. Evil previls because good keeps silent. Sorry Mozilla, but that was a REALLY bad decision.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Blocking something because RMS does not approve is the opposite of freedom, be it DRM, a binary driver, or whatever.
And denying people the ability to yell "fire" in a crowded theater is also "the opposite of freedom."
However, there's also the caveat that it's better for society to limit certain freedoms,
because otherwise they would otherwise impinge on all of us in a negative way.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Of course they had a choice. That is not even a serious question.
They are losing market share and their actions will accelerate, not reverse, that trend, just as previous missteps have done. And yes, life will go on, but a great opportunity has been lost. Firefox still has enough users that this matters, and they are throwing their weight behind DRM, and against the open web they claim to stand for at a critical moment. The notion this will get anyone to switch (back) to Firefox is ludicrous. The ones that left because they wanted something more like the other browsers are happy with their other browser, and the rest of us see this is a stab in the back not a feature.
RIP Firefox Long Live PaleMoon.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
1) DRM is bad.
Yep. So are taxes, and work for many people.
No, Taxes and work are something you don't like, but are nessecary. Taxes pay for things like your clean drinking water, roads, street signs and lighting, all the things we actually like government for. Work allows you to purchase food, a place to sleep, clothes, a budget for entertainment.
DRM has no actual upside. There is no "Weeelll but roads are kinda nice" counter point. DRM is bad. Period. It doesn't work at it stated purpose, costs the people who implement it more money to use it, and those of up willing to bypass it do so trivially while those that are not willing suffer under new restrictions while actually being paying customers.
The only thing DRM is good for is keeping DRM manufacturers in business. It literally serves no useful purpose.
Sorry, but Firefox adding DRM, in whatever manner they are, is still a shift in the browser industry going forward. There isn't a mainstream browser, that I see, committed to FOSS philosophies out there anymore. I just heard about Pale Moon, but let's face it folks. Firefox, Chrome and IE are mainstream. The others are side projects. Safari, well, doesn't exist on Linux does it. Even I.E. can be shoe-horned on Linux if needed.
Point is, moving forward, there is no longer a major browser that hasn't caved to big media, and DRM. That is, in itself, a continuation of a disturbing trend we're seeing across the Internet, and computing in general. If you don't think this isn't part of that, you haven't been paying attention.
I'm not particularly worried about Firefox providing a socket to plug in some DRM module into, because I don't really see much difference between that and other binary plugins. As a Linux user, I'm more worried that anyone who does want to use it will have to rely on Adobe to provide and maintain that module, because their track record has been rather spotty.
The big win from following a standard for the DRM plug-in is that now it will be obvious what's a DRM plug-in, and what's not. Hate DRM? Write a browser extension that makes use of this standard!
Seriously, if you really want to make heads asplode: write a FF extension that detects a DRM stream, determines the title from context, and automatically torrents the same title instead. If you can't do it as a plug-in, make a fork, since it's a stunt anyhow. I'm perfectly happy with paying Netflix, myself, but I'd certainly cheer if someone wrote this just to show the folly of the entire DRM approach.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If DRM is really impossible to implement in F/OSS software, without closed source or the threat of political force... Then what's the worry?
It seems like the worst-case scenario is media providers get a false sense of security and start providing content without silly plugins that actually ARE closed and non-accessible (under the threat of legal action).
The DRM is effectively forced.
I going to just flat out state that you've obviously never attempted to run the Netflix plugin from a ChromeOS machine (ChromeBook/ChromeBox) on another Linux platform, and discovered it won't run.
The modules in this case do navel-gazing and examine the container program to verify that the container program ins an unadulterated official build, such that you can't just compile up your own version of the browser, and expect the module to continue operating.
For Netflix on Linux desktops, this Navel-gazing took the form of utilizing the HAL, which was deprecated by its authors in 2008: http://www.freedesktop.org/wik... which was then used to generate a unique device identifier, which was used in the authorization and decryption process for the data, after having been watermarked with the same identifier at the source so that you could tell who exactly rented the content that was then stripped of DRM, and uploaded to a copy site.
This same (deprecated) module was required by Adobe FlashAccess beginning in February 2012, and was the reason for the sudden failure of rented content from both Amazon and YouTube, which both used FlashAccess as a means of DRM'ing "premium content" starting on that date.
So it's about as true to say that the DRM "isn't forced" as it's to say that the HTML "trusted proxy" mechanism would not be forced in order to allow you to make HTTPS connections, should it be standardized, thus giving a centralized ISP choke point, nominally for caching content, but practically, for introspecting HTTPS streams to make sure they are not transporting "unapproved content". If you can't access content without DRM, or you can't access HTTPS without authorizing the proxy at your ISP to listen in on the conversation, effectively instituting an automatic MITM attack for all your communications, it's kind of hard to credit participation in the scheme as "unforced" (Sure... you could choose not to have encrypted internet connectivity at all, instead of encrypted activity your ISP or anyone who got a single FISA order into your ISP could listen in on, but is that really a choice?).