On May 17, 1:40 pm, Dick Wall <[email protected]> wrote: > Now we are starting to get to some of the real meat of the discussion. > > Apple has shown (via QuickTime, iTunes, etc.) that they get that > market by covering Apple platforms, and somewhat less well, Windows - > giving enough market penetration to succeed. Of course, Linux, > Android, Palm, Solaris, etc. are not invited to the party. It is > absolutely clear to me that Apple would push their DRM as part of the > "standard", since they have already done so on Windows for these > applications.
You may be overestimating Apple's interest in the web. I think the primary reason they're involved in Windows is so that iTunes can manage iPods, iPhones, and iPads on Windows computers, since they remain so hugely popular. Safari for Windows is still a minor player (maybe it's just out there to keep spreading WebKit as a user-agent, though Chrome may well do a better job of that), and QuickTime for Windows seems to now be in maintenance mode, as it lacks feature parity with the Snow Leopard version. I also don't believe that any of Apple's "web" products - Safari or the QuickTime plugin - involve DRM. Buying DRM'ed movies and playing them all happens within iTunes. > Yes - on this point we agree. DRMd video (which is what the content > rights holders want) will take a big step back over where it is now > with Flash. DRM is bad, yes, DRM on fewer platforms is worse. Hence my hope that moving DRM's crypto key negotiation to the network may make it work on more platforms. > It's also the first point he brings up as in "First, there's open" - > clearly it matters to him that this move be seen as crusading for open > standards on the web. That's kind of a subjective read. The supposed back-and-forth between Gawker's Ryan Tate and Jobs <http://gawker.com/5539717/> makes no claims to "openness" whatsoever. [eliding a long bit about netbooks and Linux market share] > So, Linux seems to be doing better than the iPhone OS already. Why the > hell isn't this bigger news already? The market share numbers I cited <http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8> show Linux at double the market share of iPhone OS: 1% versus 0.5%. Happy? > Now though, we get to the real threat, the reason so many of the open > source community are worried about these developments. Projects like > VLC show that the open source community will indeed provide their own > solutions to video playback - very good solutions in fact - I know > people who prefer to use VLC over quicktime player on a mac because it > is faster, lighter, plays more video codecs - at least those without > DRM, and goes full screen without having to pay for a pro version (is > that still the case with quicktime? It might not be, but it used to > be). Anyone who can stand to use VLC on the Mac is heading towards an aneurysm. That's got to be the least usable, least reliable application I've used in 10 years. The only thing worse than figuring out how to transcode with it is to actually watch the resulting file. It's not every day that you see movies where the audio is out of sync not by a matter of frames, but by a matter of seconds. > However, DRM changes the rules, and that is why it is such a danger > and such a great stick for companies like Apple to beat open source > with. DRM means that the open source community *cannot* solve this > problem - at least not legally. It removes not only the level playing > field, but it arrests the players from the other team and throws them > in jail. I don't think "companies like Apple" feel a need to for a stick "beat open source with". The Mac has 5 times Linux's market share. Windows has 90 times. And while these things are subjective, I don't think for a second that client-side Linux is growing nearly as fast as you seem to. Besides, Apple makes their money selling hardware: a world without DRM would make it much easier for them to sell their devices. Amazon and iTunes going DRM free for music hasn't hurt iPod sales one bit. > This also reinforces the problems of selling Linux to people. Since no > amount of open source effort can (legally) make Linux able to play > fairplay videos (or music), or NetFlix movies, to name but a couple, > of course that's going to put some people off buying it. This is not a > "these companies should support us" play, this is a "why do these > companies actively discriminate against us" question. The numbers here > should make it clear that a Linux Netflix player, for example, would > find more potential machines to run on than the iPad has (both sales > last month, and massive number of sales in the 2.5 years since > netbooks started taking off) yet not only does such a player not > exist, there is no way to actually write one. Mono has added the video > support necessary to play videos using Silverlight, but the DRM is > still held hostage so it cannot do so. Do you see where my (and others > in the OSS community) frustration comes from? I'm going to say one more really mean thing that will piss everyone off: when you have a community that has repeatedly made it clear that it is not willing to pay for stuff, and whose intellectual leadership rails against the concept of intellectual property itself, it probably cuts into the business prospects of trying to sell media to this audience. If you were at Netflix (hi, Carl!), do you think you could make the business case for a Linux client, one that would pay off its development costs? --Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
