Here's my impression of this: Unless the OGC is economically appealing to people versus the competition even without taking into account the extra support, then our audience is largely going to be restricted people who value open hardware for some reason. It's probably safe to assume that the large majority of these people value it because they prefer free software. There may be some who want OGC because the openness lets them do something with it that they could not do with closed hardware (experiment a bit, run it on a different arch), but that will probably be relatively small compared to other users. Even so, it's likely that the majority of both groups will be aware of the issue of freedom, and want nothing to do with AACS, so it's probably safe to say that they will either be willing to stick with standard def, easily crackable DVDs (which is still legit revenue for publishers in most cases), or they'll be proficient enough to torrent their HD content. (8 years ago, I might have had moral issues with that, before DRM existed, but now I have clear moral issues with giving money to anyone backing AACS and HDCP, for so many reasons).
Obviously, as the OGC gains a certain amount of mainstream appeal, it becomes more likely it is that there will be users who complain about support for AACS and HDCP. However if you divide the possibilities into two choices: a) work on other stuff (good economics, better features, whatever), producing a card that might become popular outside the target audience, but get criticized over DRM support b) spend a disproportionate amount of time and money on design and negotiations for the purpose of making it legal and possible to use high def content for the people that really want it, but risk having the card fail to appeal to a wide enough audience to make that effort worthwhile the first choice is more focused and productive, and less risky. On a personal note, I like and want good graphics mostly for games, and I entertain the possibility that one day there will be an OGC that can be considered high performance, even if it's it's not going to happen on the first run. That's what is motivating me to get involved, and as such, my own preference is that none of these technically unnecessary DRM related misfeatures take any resources away from the above goal. I don't know how many would disagree with me about this, perhaps more than I would expect, but otherwise, I think it makes sense to just focus on the graphics. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
