Adobe, Linux and DRM

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3rd time was the charm

First off, my name is Paul, but I go by, TakeIT2(that is take it 2) Seems like a lot of folks that use sans serif in the browser make that mistake, or is that one of those font rendering issue things.

Actually your comment makes a better post than the original, feel free to otherwise pretend you are writing back at me anytime.

Spinning commercial buzz words to me is kinda pointless, I admit to being rather biased in my point of view. The only thing to me that is rich about a web app is it usually has cost a lot of money to produce. For the folks that can create them them self, I most certainly want to acknowledge the time, energy, effort, and personal cost that has gone into you developing your skills, the world is more interesting in some ways for it. Most buzz words to me are just a sales pitch. I don't cotton to flim-flam, so I am rather aggressive to buzzing words. So if by rich internet app, you mean audio/visual candy coated text entry form that sits in a layer beyond my control, that intercesses search functions, requests for data, a file perhaps audio or visual, or a bank statement, or tickets to some event; well a cat can be a mouse trap too. Can we build a better cat? You don't have to cause I just moved into a building with with 20 you can have them all, I am not a cat person. But the cleche goes, build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door. Glorifying basic stuff(BS) is what marketing is all about. The thing is that the BS is disproportionate to real needs. The BS is about the needs of the marketer in direct opposition to the needs of the client. It's a hard sell, a hand sell(put the item in the persons hands) and then tell them there life is gonna suck if it ever leaves their hands. Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends....

If you hate DRM how can there be a good way to implement it? To say, that's just the type of world we live in, necessary evils and all, is to give up/in to the marauding horde. Advertising and Interrogation's actually have a lot in common. Does the world come to a grinding halt every time there is something we don't like, frankly yes it does, just not all at once please.TYVM. Frankly the assault on our personal/mental space/place by commercial interests via ads, government regulation and pundits hardly leaves a well balanced mind room to stand on one foot if we so choose. Did you even notice the over 160,000 ads you saw last week? If you tuned them out, limited your own natural faculties, the horde is waring you down so you will sign a confession/contract for any crime they would like to attribute to you. By participating in the commercial culture you have to dumb yourself down, or else go insane with the warped associations of marketers. With a degree in economics I can see your need to get paid as well. I have had employees that I have enjoyed paying, some I would have payed more if I could, others I feel needed to pay me, none the less it was my money to spend. "DRM-Because we won't get paid without it." DRM is not just bad because tracks you buy from iTunes cant be played where, when, and how you choose. DRM is not just bad because Apple, Microsoft or Adobe is fronting it, it is the aggregation behind it, the consolidation of supposed power behind it. Give DRM an inch, look it in the eye, and hope you have the will to fend it off, because it wants your soul, to own you, to return you to your indentured, no, enslaved state. Your the economics guy, follow the money behind any DRM transaction. "DRM-because the banks love to get their cut."

Frankly Microsoft has yet to find it's best. Maybe you can find your best looking at least common denominators, paths of least resistance, or the perennial favorite strong arm tactics, if so there is a future for you in the fire escape trade, come up to town. Competition is the great mis-direction in any magic market act. But let's be real about the true blood thirsty nature of competition, gatherers will unfortunately be left to pick over the dead, if they them self are not dead. Help? Help who? Corporations are not real people! They like to think they are, and they like to treat us to personable language usage, as though they are, but it is the costume on a frightened actor. It would be great if life was egalitarian as scoring golf, then I could park right next to the front door of Wall-Mart, cause I got my handicap. Linux will not succeed because it is being thrown a bone, or given a leg up, though it will gnaw on either to nourish itself. That is part of why the actors are so frightened.

Acting out of fear can leave us short sighted. To be sure there are hosts of economic issues that drive people to and from operating systems as well as the internet. That is their money to spend or make, that is one of the "benefits" of a free market. The short sided view in the fear driven politically correct, "play nice this is just a corporate takeover" world is they have developed us to not care, that is the way it is. We don't care about one brand or another unless peer pressure (class status) dictates the fad. We are habituated, lazy primates. Sure we look fondly back on "Originals." The smells, the flavors, the colors, the sounds, the textures of some cultivated reverie. And we care when a family recipe can't be made because an ingredient cannot be had the way it once was, times change, we care then. Our habits are broken, the pattern changes. Convenience is out the window. Oh, is the apple cart upset then. Fear says we can't because it is inculcated. A child needs to have limits, and structure. Justify your service, as if it needs justification. It is the fear in the eye of the actor when they realize they are not the part they play. The short sighted view believes it's own hype and reacts.

Reconcile, balance, cope, call it what you like. Linux is free and open. People made it that way. Just like people make proprietary software as well. Free is that fuzzy word in this mix that is not being clarified. Free as in money software can run on the same system as payed for software. It happens on Windows and Mac as well, that upsets their apple cart. Enter software as a service, net apps, ways for vendors to control "their" market share. Free as in do with it as you will; where is the control in that? Those folks must be anarchists, or worse communists.

"It's hard to reconcile the need to keep Linux free and open with the need for people to make money." That statement could imply the very worst case scenario, that by high hook or by crook some cattle will be steak on my grill tonight. That corporate interests will just flat out steal what was given and not sold. That corporate interests will lay claim to all that came before, until there can be only one monopoly, one benevolent dictator seeing all the data behind the DRM manacle. This implication is heightened by your reliance upon Adobe/Flash examples; though if you have eyes to see, let them read.

As I have taken my time writing back to you, I have also noticed a few of the other comments of yours and others as well. I have not forgotten your question to me, even at this length. I will differ with you in that I believe Linux has taken off. If you are looking only with eyes of an economist it would be hard to distinguish that in fact Linux is in flight. For one thing, penguins are a flightless bird at home in cold water where they soar as much as they waddle when they walk on land. Linux is not your average community project.

If you look at competitive markets, there is only one Microsoft, and only one Mac OS, but there are at least 4 commercial distributions of Linux, not to mention the plethora of free distributions. As much as there seem to be three main desktop OS options, the fact is there are more. If that would spell out competative for you I could stop there. As far as market share success, we have seen the pie; but what shows in the pie? The Money? No. The fact that Linux shows up at all is a testament to it's basic success, given it's general lack of funding. Dedication to purpose is clear sign of success, or so the MacAdicts will tell you; does that same generalization apply to Linux, only if Linux is running on a Mac. I am trying to just stick to desktop Linux because that is how I believe you framed the the question, but if I were to digress at the diversity of the market, I would say count the number of hardware platforms the system is applied to, at that you can see a wing flap but it is not the flight you speak of. The fact that you have to ask about success in a narrow range, imho, says most comparisons should be going the other way in terms of proof of success. To me that is a sign of success.

But ******** success, can you say SuSE/Lenovo? Look at the ZDNet coverage of LinuxWorld. SGL desktops available now in SuSE and other Linux distros, while Microsoft plays it safe ripping the guts out of Vista, tossing out all it worked for.

Linux will succeed in the face of commercial apps that run on it long beyond any quarterly statement because people make it. They love to make it. And because they love to do it, it will persist against fiscal judgments. Will any one become another Bill Gates out of the Linux world? I doubt that kind of success will follow any individual out of the Linux world even Linus Torvolds, that kind of success only comes from an overwhelming self-serving capitalist. That doesn't make Bill evil, just rich; and he has the rest of his life to work out what community service means to himself. Because in the long run, the success of Linux will not only be financial, but in it's diversity as a good place for education, arts, and community, because people just want it that way.

Posted by: TakeIT2   Posted on: 08/18/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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