When a sufficiently complete reimplementation exists, and is actually viable, I don't think you can call it vendor lock-in.
FreeDOS is such an implementation. Wine isn't, and neither is ReactOS, so Windows still locks people in.
The point you seem to be missing is, I'm not talking about the intent -- most vendors would rather you use them than anyone else. I'm talking about the reality -- develop an app for DOS, and it's portable. Develop an app for Windows or.NET, and it's probably not.
That's the whole point: just because a reimplementation exists, doesn't make the original project open source. That's exactly what I'm saying.
-
And you're right. Thank you for stating that.
What's your point?
The reason it is lock-in is because the original implementation by Google is considered the gold standard and they can change that standard at any time without you knowing what happened behind the scenes.
And if they just change that standard at a whim, they're going to alienate developers. That doesn't help lock-in, that helps drive people to your saner competitors.
This is in contrast to PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc where you can easily fork their implementation.
And when you fork that implementation, how is that any better?
Take Ruby, in particular. MRI is the standard. If there's a dispute between MRI and JRuby, MRI wins by default. You can fork and reimplement all you want, but there's still one gold standard which can change under your feet without notice -- and if your fork is different enough to actually have a point, you're probably not going to be able to simply port that source -- you're going to have to reimplement that change.
So by your logic, everything is vendor lock-in.
And yes, DOS is also vendor lock-in
Sorry, no. DOS is old enough, and well-enough understood, that you can reasonably expect any DOS program to also work on FreeDOS. Sure, you're locked into the DOS platform, but that's platform lock-in, which is entirely different than vendor lock-in.
I'll admit that Mono and Wine are far enough behind that they aren't quite the same. But considering how fast AppDrop appeared, I would guess AppEngine is going to be portable enough.
Wow, very childish.
No, it's free advice. You didn't seem to understand what a word meant. My intent wasn't to insult you, but to help you communicate.
The fact that it also insulted you was just a nice side effect.
We used to call it copy protection, and a simple disk check wasn't a big deal. Why, when we call it DRM, is it suddenly a big deal that it checks the disk?
I didn't like it then, and I cracked it then, too.
And I don't trust SecuROM, the software. How about the checks for Daemontools, etc?
but if you never support things financially, then no one cares.
I do. I buy games with no DRM, or with what I consider to be an acceptable level of DRM.
I'm young, I'm single, I live in a small town with low living expenses, and I make a decent wage. I have money to burn. If I am pirating, it's precisely because I don't want to financially support their raping me with a rusty pipe.
Stop pretending like you are justified for piracy. You're aren't.
I never claimed to be.
I'm only pointing out the obvious, inevitable outcome: Drive away your customers, and they will either become pirates, or stop gaming altogether.
Man up and just say you want to steal the game.
Well, let's see, no, I don't. I want to buy it, and have it not be DRM'd to hell.
I have money to spend. I like to game. I can and do buy games -- I buy Steam games, I buy indie games (Penny Arcade, Lugaru, Introversion games).
But I won't pay for the SecuROM experience, now or ever.
As for a portable XBox 360
Well, that's one of two problems down...
Except, of course, that the thing still looks to be several times bigger and bulkier than my laptop, and infinitely less functional, for anything other than gaming. So no.
AppDrop is that particular Ruby on Rails application you're looking at on the site, not Google App Engine itself.
According to that site:
Download the modified Portable App Engine SDK or get the AppDrop.com source code (the Rails app you're looking at).
Either way, the size of the download proves nothing. Have you actually tried using it? It does, in fact, run AppEngine apps on Amazon EC2.
What does that mean? How can something by reimplemented as open source without being released as open source?
You need a dictionary. Badly.
Wine is a reimplementation of Windows. Windows itself has not been released as open source. It has, however, been reimplemented in Wine, and in ReactOS. And Wine absolutely is open source, as is ReactOS.
If that is what passes for "open source" then DOS should be considered open source since FreeDOS was based off it.
Missing the point.
Show me where I ever, even once, claimed App Engine was open source. I didn't.
All I said was that App Engine is not lock-in. In the same sense, if you wrote a DOS app today, you certainly wouldn't be locked in to DOS -- your app would likely run on Windows XP, in DOSbox on Linux, and in FreeDOS.
In other words, you have a choice of vendor. Which is the exact fucking opposite of vendor lock-in.
And which also has nothing whatsoever to do with open source. It's certainly easier to avoid vendor lock-in by choosing open source, but there are completely closed-source systems which do not promote vendor lock-in, and completely open ones which do.
Maybe I'm just drawing a blank, but MS has never actually prevented development, they just packaged things and integrated things to leverage the field significantly in their favor.
You really should read my entire post before replying... I said exactly that two paragraphs down:
But hey, at least Microsoft didn't stop Netscape from happening, they just competed unfairly. Apple is doing both...
Second: Same problem. What, you think I can just burn a backup copy and expect it to work? Why should I even need a disc, when hard drives are so big these days?
Third: I have a laptop. Where can I get a portable version of an Xbox?
On the DRM front, the game does come with SecuROM, but Bethesda says it's only used for a disc check.
On the raping front, the game does come with a rusty pipe, but Bethesda says it's only going to be used to beat you repeatedly.
What, I'm supposed to feel glad they weren't also going to ram it up my ass?
You seem to be missing the point. "Only a disc check" still means I'm going to be cracking it as soon as it's out of the box, so I don't have to go find a fucking CD every time I want to play the game.
And if I have to crack a game to play it, I won't buy it. Treat me like a criminal, fine, I'll be one. Pirate bay it is...
All of your storage is still done using Google's Big Table and the GQL query language. If you can find me the source for Big Table, please show it to me.
I have no idea how compatible they are -- I see lots of talk of reimplementing GQL, and no actual mention of an implementation -- but the speed with which Appdrop was released certainly gives the lie to AppEngine's "lock-in". If you really need something Google is provided, there's a very good chance you can reimplement it quickly using what's already out there.
Windows 7 is "Vista with lipstick" - it's completely compatible with Vista, according to Microsoft. Most importantly, Vista drivers should require zero changes, one of the "Vista killers" with regard to the huge base of XP drivers.
The drivers are a separate issue -- what's more interesting is what they've done to userspace (if anything).
But I wouldn't be at all surprised. After all, Microsoft is still convinced (from the Mojave project) that Vista's problem was an image problem -- which seems funny to me, as Vista was so much about image (Aero) -- so if they can fix a few of the more glaring problems, package it up as "Windows 7" (which they did talk about as being so different), and sell the same shit back to us, that's a win for them.
But I seem to remember that you could kill UAC in Vista, also.
Nobody ever suggested you could run anything on Windows, and that makes it no different than most of the other OSes out there. It comes down to the simplest of playground rules:
My ball, my game.
There's a reason we're reminded of the 90's and Microsoft vs Netscape. But hey, at least Microsoft didn't stop Netscape from happening, they just competed unfairly. Apple is doing both -- they're bundling Safari (just like Microsoft bundled IE), and they're actively working to prevent Opera from even being sold on that platform.
The only reason I like Macs is that they tend to work. Apple has been more closed and more anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was -- and I'm not just talking about the iPhone.
you want to be able to view your position without having it on the table for everyone to see?
I think they'd be able to see the tracing paper, and I think the point you're hovering it over would give them a clue.
And I think this could be done much more easily, maybe even cheaper, with separate screens for the HUDs.
And I'm pretty sure that
If the device is able to sense that you're holding Alpha team's HUD and not Bravo team's
That's not part of it. Not that you couldn't add that with RFID or something...
the beauty of technology is that if it's possible, someone will come up with something really cool and then everyone will shift their thinking to "Why would anybody want to be restricted to a two-dimensional surface?"
If it's possible -- and it's a good idea, and there isn't already something better.
For example: It's possible to buy a laptop with two hard drives (configured for RAID), a 19" display, and otherwise specs to rival any gaming desktop. But I doubt it sells much -- it's ridiculously more expensive, there are better options in the pipe (I have a solid state drive), and I can't really imagine a situation where there's a point to having a laptop, but a 19" beast like that wouldn't be too bulky.
A better example: The CueCat. It's absolutely technically feasible, probably even cheaper now. But we certainly don't say "How did I ever live before I had a barcode reader on my computer?"
The technology is undeniably cool, and apparently possible. But until someone comes up with a use for it which is not only cool, but actually worth the expense, and not possible to do in some cheaper/better way, it's still pretty pointless.
Of course, this is why we do research, and build prototypes -- to find out which of us is right. I can't imagine anyone will find a use case -- but maybe they will.
To be fair, that's not a way to use the same toolchain on Linux... There's SystemTap for something similar, though.
I don't know enough about either tool -- that was jut a minute or so of Googling -- but I would guess that SystemTap is far from "archaic". It would be closer to "bleeding edge" -- but it's also been a few years, so maybe not.
The quickest link I could find there was this one.
That fails "best for the consumer", because now I'm getting a degraded product -- and yet, once we know it's being done, it's usually possible to circumvent.
But if you can do non-lossy watermarking, or if it actually doesn't impact quality (for example, it is applied during the encoding process, and produces no lossier output than without it), I have no problem with it. Still possible to circumvent, but impossible to be sure that it's circumvented until you release enough copies for them to check the watermark. At the same time, it doesn't affect legitimate use.
I generally categorize watermarking outside of DRM, however -- it's the only kind of "DRM" which doesn't also require specific software to play the media back. And it's that requirement for specific software that is what bothers me the most about DRM. (After all, I don't mind Steam so much, because you already need specific software (the game itself) to play any games. But I want to play my media on anything that has the right codecs.)
I'm usually the first to bash Microsoft. I'm usually the last to defend them. I do think they deserve every bit of flame they get.
But this is just getting stupid...
Apple did exactly the same thing with OS X. I'm talking about the initial launch -- OS X was a completely backwards-incompatible change from OS 9. In fact, there were major architectural changes -- like the introduction of such modern features as protected memory -- which would have made it pretty much impossible to maintain pure backwards compatibility and do everything they wanted to do.
So they said "fuck it", switched to a completely different architecture, and wrote an emulation/virtualization system called Classic.
One thing which I know I've heard described for Windows 7 was the ability to run an older version (like Vista) in a virtual machine. You know, kind of like Classic. The only difference would be if Microsoft wanted to charge you for the license -- and I hope they aren't that stupid.
I (and others) have frequently disparaged Microsoft for their bloated, crufty, undocumented (or under-documented, or mis-documented), and downright weird APIs. I know that before I heard about this change (which isn't news, by the way, it's been on Slashdot before), I figured I would do exactly the same thing if I was in Microsoft's shoes. Don't even try to support the old APIs -- just start entirely from scratch, build a compatibility layer, and tell people to upgrade.
One more thing, and then I'm done: What the fuck does this have to do with lock-in? What, did you think Win32 was open? It's only portable thanks to Wine, and Wine never has, never will, never can catch up and support every single app.
If you're going to be locked in anyway, why not be locked into something newer and (presumably) cleaner?
If it's not clean, that's another argument. But this strategy is not about lock-in.
Someone needs to invest in an open source DRM mechanism.
Open source is fundamentally incompatible with DRM.
Either you have security-through-obscurity (in which case, I can just look at the source code), or you have at least some of the DRM implemented in hardware -- in which case, it's severely crippled your computer and your ability to run arbitrary software, including modified versions of the original "open source" code.
Which pretty much kills the point of open source. Look at Tivo for an example.
Not that it's stopped other people from trying...
if they were the first to create a true secure DRM format,
That is impossible. DRM, by its very nature, cannot be secured. The more "secure" you get, the closer you get to having a console or a set-top box, instead of a computer -- and it's still not secure, just that much more of a pain to crack.
they would be free to shape it in a way that is best for consumers whilst still being good for content producers.
"Best for consumers" means being able to do whatever you want with it, except pirate it. One of the things I want to be able to do with my media is use it on entirely open systems. This is a reasonable request, I think, and it is not itself piracy. However, an entirely open system would by definition make piracy possible.
And "best for content producers" generally means "not pissing off your customers".
So, the best for both parties is to abandon DRM. The content producers haven't realized this yet, and you aren't helping the situation by pretending that DRM can work.
Slashdot Mirror
When a sufficiently complete reimplementation exists, and is actually viable, I don't think you can call it vendor lock-in.
FreeDOS is such an implementation. Wine isn't, and neither is ReactOS, so Windows still locks people in.
The point you seem to be missing is, I'm not talking about the intent -- most vendors would rather you use them than anyone else. I'm talking about the reality -- develop an app for DOS, and it's portable. Develop an app for Windows or .NET, and it's probably not.
That's the whole point: just because a reimplementation exists, doesn't make the original project open source. That's exactly what I'm saying.
-
And you're right. Thank you for stating that.
What's your point?
The reason it is lock-in is because the original implementation by Google is considered the gold standard and they can change that standard at any time without you knowing what happened behind the scenes.
And if they just change that standard at a whim, they're going to alienate developers. That doesn't help lock-in, that helps drive people to your saner competitors.
This is in contrast to PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc where you can easily fork their implementation.
And when you fork that implementation, how is that any better?
Take Ruby, in particular. MRI is the standard. If there's a dispute between MRI and JRuby, MRI wins by default. You can fork and reimplement all you want, but there's still one gold standard which can change under your feet without notice -- and if your fork is different enough to actually have a point, you're probably not going to be able to simply port that source -- you're going to have to reimplement that change.
So by your logic, everything is vendor lock-in.
And yes, DOS is also vendor lock-in
Sorry, no. DOS is old enough, and well-enough understood, that you can reasonably expect any DOS program to also work on FreeDOS. Sure, you're locked into the DOS platform, but that's platform lock-in, which is entirely different than vendor lock-in.
I'll admit that Mono and Wine are far enough behind that they aren't quite the same. But considering how fast AppDrop appeared, I would guess AppEngine is going to be portable enough.
Wow, very childish.
No, it's free advice. You didn't seem to understand what a word meant. My intent wasn't to insult you, but to help you communicate.
The fact that it also insulted you was just a nice side effect.
We used to call it copy protection, and a simple disk check wasn't a big deal. Why, when we call it DRM, is it suddenly a big deal that it checks the disk?
I didn't like it then, and I cracked it then, too.
And I don't trust SecuROM, the software. How about the checks for Daemontools, etc?
You're right -- and I've generally stopped buying AAA games because of this. Or at least, I pick them very, very carefully.
I actually don't mind Steam. Just saying.
but if you never support things financially, then no one cares.
I do. I buy games with no DRM, or with what I consider to be an acceptable level of DRM.
I'm young, I'm single, I live in a small town with low living expenses, and I make a decent wage. I have money to burn. If I am pirating, it's precisely because I don't want to financially support their raping me with a rusty pipe.
Stop pretending like you are justified for piracy. You're aren't.
I never claimed to be.
I'm only pointing out the obvious, inevitable outcome: Drive away your customers, and they will either become pirates, or stop gaming altogether.
Man up and just say you want to steal the game.
Well, let's see, no, I don't. I want to buy it, and have it not be DRM'd to hell.
I have money to spend. I like to game. I can and do buy games -- I buy Steam games, I buy indie games (Penny Arcade, Lugaru, Introversion games).
But I won't pay for the SecuROM experience, now or ever.
As for a portable XBox 360
Well, that's one of two problems down...
Except, of course, that the thing still looks to be several times bigger and bulkier than my laptop, and infinitely less functional, for anything other than gaming. So no.
AppDrop is that particular Ruby on Rails application you're looking at on the site, not Google App Engine itself.
According to that site:
Download the modified Portable App Engine SDK or get the AppDrop.com source code (the Rails app you're looking at).
Either way, the size of the download proves nothing. Have you actually tried using it? It does, in fact, run AppEngine apps on Amazon EC2.
What does that mean? How can something by reimplemented as open source without being released as open source?
You need a dictionary. Badly.
Wine is a reimplementation of Windows. Windows itself has not been released as open source. It has, however, been reimplemented in Wine, and in ReactOS. And Wine absolutely is open source, as is ReactOS.
If that is what passes for "open source" then DOS should be considered open source since FreeDOS was based off it.
Missing the point.
Show me where I ever, even once, claimed App Engine was open source. I didn't.
All I said was that App Engine is not lock-in. In the same sense, if you wrote a DOS app today, you certainly wouldn't be locked in to DOS -- your app would likely run on Windows XP, in DOSbox on Linux, and in FreeDOS.
In other words, you have a choice of vendor. Which is the exact fucking opposite of vendor lock-in.
And which also has nothing whatsoever to do with open source. It's certainly easier to avoid vendor lock-in by choosing open source, but there are completely closed-source systems which do not promote vendor lock-in, and completely open ones which do.
Maybe I'm just drawing a blank, but MS has never actually prevented development, they just packaged things and integrated things to leverage the field significantly in their favor.
You really should read my entire post before replying... I said exactly that two paragraphs down:
But hey, at least Microsoft didn't stop Netscape from happening, they just competed unfairly. Apple is doing both...
Apple does have a monopoly over the areas they've defined -- the iPhone among them.
But you are right -- the one difference is that Apple isn't quite big enough. Do you think they would behave any better if they were?
Hmm... Interesting. The game just moved from "no way in hell" to "maybe."
But I shouldn't have to do this.
Well, you could get the Xbox version
First: I don't have an Xbox.
Second: Same problem. What, you think I can just burn a backup copy and expect it to work? Why should I even need a disc, when hard drives are so big these days?
Third: I have a laptop. Where can I get a portable version of an Xbox?
On the DRM front, the game does come with SecuROM, but Bethesda says it's only used for a disc check.
On the raping front, the game does come with a rusty pipe, but Bethesda says it's only going to be used to beat you repeatedly.
What, I'm supposed to feel glad they weren't also going to ram it up my ass?
You seem to be missing the point. "Only a disc check" still means I'm going to be cracking it as soon as it's out of the box, so I don't have to go find a fucking CD every time I want to play the game.
And if I have to crack a game to play it, I won't buy it. Treat me like a criminal, fine, I'll be one. Pirate bay it is...
Yeah, I did mention that it hasn't stopped people from trying.
It's still a stupid idea.
I see your argument from authority, and raise you a go-back-and-read-my-post.
Please enlighten us on exactly how it has been reimplemented as open source?
Right here.
All of your storage is still done using Google's Big Table and the GQL query language. If you can find me the source for Big Table, please show it to me.
I didn't say "released", I said "reimplemented".
And Hadoop has done exactly that.
I have no idea how compatible they are -- I see lots of talk of reimplementing GQL, and no actual mention of an implementation -- but the speed with which Appdrop was released certainly gives the lie to AppEngine's "lock-in". If you really need something Google is provided, there's a very good chance you can reimplement it quickly using what's already out there.
Windows 7 is "Vista with lipstick" - it's completely compatible with Vista, according to Microsoft. Most importantly, Vista drivers should require zero changes, one of the "Vista killers" with regard to the huge base of XP drivers.
The drivers are a separate issue -- what's more interesting is what they've done to userspace (if anything).
But I wouldn't be at all surprised. After all, Microsoft is still convinced (from the Mojave project) that Vista's problem was an image problem -- which seems funny to me, as Vista was so much about image (Aero) -- so if they can fix a few of the more glaring problems, package it up as "Windows 7" (which they did talk about as being so different), and sell the same shit back to us, that's a win for them.
But I seem to remember that you could kill UAC in Vista, also.
And who ever considered the iPhone to be a necessity?
I have a wireless device. It cost me $1 when it came with my plan.
Nobody ever suggested you could run anything on Windows, and that makes it no different than most of the other OSes out there. It comes down to the simplest of playground rules:
My ball, my game.
There's a reason we're reminded of the 90's and Microsoft vs Netscape. But hey, at least Microsoft didn't stop Netscape from happening, they just competed unfairly. Apple is doing both -- they're bundling Safari (just like Microsoft bundled IE), and they're actively working to prevent Opera from even being sold on that platform.
The only reason I like Macs is that they tend to work. Apple has been more closed and more anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was -- and I'm not just talking about the iPhone.
you want to be able to view your position without having it on the table for everyone to see?
I think they'd be able to see the tracing paper, and I think the point you're hovering it over would give them a clue.
And I think this could be done much more easily, maybe even cheaper, with separate screens for the HUDs.
And I'm pretty sure that
If the device is able to sense that you're holding Alpha team's HUD and not Bravo team's
That's not part of it. Not that you couldn't add that with RFID or something...
the beauty of technology is that if it's possible, someone will come up with something really cool and then everyone will shift their thinking to "Why would anybody want to be restricted to a two-dimensional surface?"
If it's possible -- and it's a good idea, and there isn't already something better.
For example: It's possible to buy a laptop with two hard drives (configured for RAID), a 19" display, and otherwise specs to rival any gaming desktop. But I doubt it sells much -- it's ridiculously more expensive, there are better options in the pipe (I have a solid state drive), and I can't really imagine a situation where there's a point to having a laptop, but a 19" beast like that wouldn't be too bulky.
A better example: The CueCat. It's absolutely technically feasible, probably even cheaper now. But we certainly don't say "How did I ever live before I had a barcode reader on my computer?"
The technology is undeniably cool, and apparently possible. But until someone comes up with a use for it which is not only cool, but actually worth the expense, and not possible to do in some cheaper/better way, it's still pretty pointless.
Of course, this is why we do research, and build prototypes -- to find out which of us is right. I can't imagine anyone will find a use case -- but maybe they will.
Which can also be used for Linux apps.
To be fair, that's not a way to use the same toolchain on Linux... There's SystemTap for something similar, though.
I don't know enough about either tool -- that was jut a minute or so of Googling -- but I would guess that SystemTap is far from "archaic". It would be closer to "bleeding edge" -- but it's also been a few years, so maybe not.
Or.. you use "lossy" encryption.
The quickest link I could find there was this one.
That fails "best for the consumer", because now I'm getting a degraded product -- and yet, once we know it's being done, it's usually possible to circumvent.
But if you can do non-lossy watermarking, or if it actually doesn't impact quality (for example, it is applied during the encoding process, and produces no lossier output than without it), I have no problem with it. Still possible to circumvent, but impossible to be sure that it's circumvented until you release enough copies for them to check the watermark. At the same time, it doesn't affect legitimate use.
I generally categorize watermarking outside of DRM, however -- it's the only kind of "DRM" which doesn't also require specific software to play the media back. And it's that requirement for specific software that is what bothers me the most about DRM. (After all, I don't mind Steam so much, because you already need specific software (the game itself) to play any games. But I want to play my media on anything that has the right codecs.)
I'm usually the first to bash Microsoft. I'm usually the last to defend them. I do think they deserve every bit of flame they get.
But this is just getting stupid...
Apple did exactly the same thing with OS X. I'm talking about the initial launch -- OS X was a completely backwards-incompatible change from OS 9. In fact, there were major architectural changes -- like the introduction of such modern features as protected memory -- which would have made it pretty much impossible to maintain pure backwards compatibility and do everything they wanted to do.
So they said "fuck it", switched to a completely different architecture, and wrote an emulation/virtualization system called Classic.
One thing which I know I've heard described for Windows 7 was the ability to run an older version (like Vista) in a virtual machine. You know, kind of like Classic. The only difference would be if Microsoft wanted to charge you for the license -- and I hope they aren't that stupid.
I (and others) have frequently disparaged Microsoft for their bloated, crufty, undocumented (or under-documented, or mis-documented), and downright weird APIs. I know that before I heard about this change (which isn't news, by the way, it's been on Slashdot before), I figured I would do exactly the same thing if I was in Microsoft's shoes. Don't even try to support the old APIs -- just start entirely from scratch, build a compatibility layer, and tell people to upgrade.
One more thing, and then I'm done: What the fuck does this have to do with lock-in? What, did you think Win32 was open? It's only portable thanks to Wine, and Wine never has, never will, never can catch up and support every single app.
If you're going to be locked in anyway, why not be locked into something newer and (presumably) cleaner?
If it's not clean, that's another argument. But this strategy is not about lock-in.
End rant.
...which has been reimplemented as open source.
It only took maybe a week after it was launched, too.
The only reason you'd be "locked in" to Google's service there is if you depend on them hosting your app for free. I call that a fair trade.
Someone needs to invest in an open source DRM mechanism.
Open source is fundamentally incompatible with DRM.
Either you have security-through-obscurity (in which case, I can just look at the source code), or you have at least some of the DRM implemented in hardware -- in which case, it's severely crippled your computer and your ability to run arbitrary software, including modified versions of the original "open source" code.
Which pretty much kills the point of open source. Look at Tivo for an example.
Not that it's stopped other people from trying...
if they were the first to create a true secure DRM format,
That is impossible. DRM, by its very nature, cannot be secured. The more "secure" you get, the closer you get to having a console or a set-top box, instead of a computer -- and it's still not secure, just that much more of a pain to crack.
they would be free to shape it in a way that is best for consumers whilst still being good for content producers.
"Best for consumers" means being able to do whatever you want with it, except pirate it. One of the things I want to be able to do with my media is use it on entirely open systems. This is a reasonable request, I think, and it is not itself piracy. However, an entirely open system would by definition make piracy possible.
And "best for content producers" generally means "not pissing off your customers".
So, the best for both parties is to abandon DRM. The content producers haven't realized this yet, and you aren't helping the situation by pretending that DRM can work.
Well, they're trying to use Dirac...
BitTorrent is likely a bad idea...
But either way, I agree, I don't see the problem. I've been streaming video for years on Linux.
Is Net Neutrality (TM) going to prevent that specific type of corporate asshattery?
Well, yes. Net Neutrality is about not prioritizing, filtering, blocking, or mangling traffic, but letting it through to where it's meant to go.
Pretty simple, really.