Microsoft settles in whiteboard patent dustup

TalkBack 39 of 102:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

I had no idea...

...how much someone could intentionally misconstrue my comments. I'll try just one more time, and this time I'll try to use really small words so anyone can understand.

1) DVDs
For employees in the office: Non-applicable
No one wants employees watching movies, so whether or not any computer in a corporate environment is capable of it is moot. This is a total non-issue for open-source adoption. The patents covering DVD decryption do not make a lick of difference in whether or not a company adopts an operating system at the back-room server level OR at the employee workstation level.

As far as the legality of DVD playback is concerned, it's perfectly legal in every country but the United States right now, and even in the US, the legality of DVD players such as Xine and MPlayer using something like libdvdcss hasn't been questioned. The Linux distros have been erring on the side of caution and not shipping a DVD player with their operating systems, but that's only an issue with home users. And yes, most DVDs do come with a DVD player application you can install, but Windows itself does not ship with one by default. This means that "out of the box" (Bit's favorite phrase), Windows and Linux are in exactly the same boat.

DVD patents are absolutely meaningless in relation to open source adoption. Get it? Got it? Good! Feel free to yield this point any time you like, Bit.

2) DRM-enabled documents.
Bit, Bit, Bit... You said, and I quote, "How about access to MS Office documents that have DRM enabled?" MS Office documents. Are we clear on what type of documents we're talking about? Those created by MS Office that have DRM enabled? Are we completely clear? Yes? Good.

Okay, let's review my response to that. "The APIs for DRM are open. If you've got a Windows DRM server in your environment, it's trivial to implement a method for authenticating against it in Linux."

In other words, it is relatively simple to engineer a method of authenticating to a Windows DRM Server in your environment from other platforms. Because Microsoft has been kind enough to publish specifications for how programs should perform that authentication. That should be quite enough to implement a means of authenticating against DRM with third-party applications such as Open Office.

Is that all clear? I thought so, which is why I was a little confused when you started mentioning HIPAA requirements, the RIAA and MPAA, and DRM-embedded applications. You see, HIPAA's security requirements don't include DRM (see http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2003_register&docid=fr20fe03-4 for more info, and ZDNet's probably gonna chop that URL up a bit), the RIAA and MPAA have all but admitted DRM for music and video content, which can be easily defeated the moment you actually give the user access to the content, doesn't work, and DRM-embedded applications and hardware have nothing to do with the topic at hand (DRM-enabled MS Office documents). Now unless you're gonna point me to a link which tells me, in no uncertain terms, that despite the open specification for Windows DRM you must use Microsoft software to authenticate to it, or you'll be breaking patents left and right, then yield this point, Bit.

3) Multimedia
Okay, let's look at the back-end, first. Windows is the only platform that can do the back-end work for streaming WMV and WMA content. You are absolutely right in that. Furthermore, they appear to have patents on that technology, although it would be trivial for RealNetworks or any of a number of other organizations to claim prior art. So, for Windows media, Windows platforms appear to be the only platforms that can stream it. Quicktime content can be streamed from an Apple system, a Linux system, a Solaris system, and a few others, legally. All other commonly used codecs (Real, DivX, MPEG, etc.) can be streamed or served up by the platform of your choosing. So Linux can't serve up Windows media content, and probably will never be able to.

My question to you is this: What is that going to do to stop the adoption of Linux? Consider these points... In most corporate environments, streaming video and audio is moot. Videoconferencing software is about as far as they'll get with video and audio, and that's usually going to be handled by hardware implementations, since software videoconferencing...let's be honest...sucks. My company uses a very common hardware video conference setup.

Now, if your business is to stream highspeed content on the net, like http://launch.yahoo.com, then you probably rack after rack of systems to handle the bandwidth. What these systems are will vary according to need. Most of the systems serving content on the above site are Linux and Solaris, but there are a lot of Windows systems, too. In this particular, fairly narrow market, Windows patents will keep Linux from taking over for a while. I'll go ahead and grant you a tie on this point, Bit.

Come back when you've brushed up on your game a bit.

Posted by: Damon K   Posted on: 12/29/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Infrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now
• Reducing Server Total Cost of Ownership with VMware Virtualization Software VMware VMware virtualization enables customers to reduce their server TCO and ... Download Now
• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now