[BC] Digital Rights Management vs Security and Reliability

[Cowboy]

On Wednesday 11 January 2006 10:44 pm, Fred Gleason wrote:

>As an industry, we are heavily dependent upon IT systems as the basic tools by 
>which we get our daily work done.  What happens when DRM comes built into the 
>hardware and our production/automation systems start getting accorded the 
>same sort of 'rights' as a teenager looking for a Britney Spears download?

 Personally, I don't see it as THAT big a deal !

 Some of the systems and software I've dealt with are decidedly NOT free,
 including content.
 A *properly* written system will deal with this in stride.

 For instance :
 At $5K per seat, QNX can hardly be considered a "free" system.
 As such, it has a certain amount of what could be broadly classified as DRM
 built into it.
 Any, and every, piece of software installed on a QNX system MUST have
 a valid authorization "license."
 If one bypasses the "installer" and copies files directly, they won't run
 without an appropriate license. 
 They really do a good job !
 Since QNX is what it is, an RTOS that does deal with things like
 preservation of human life, they ( if no one else ) will have a solution
 to the kind of teenager you suggest above.
 Since QNX is primarily targetted at Intel hardware, it must be in some
 compatible way portable to other Intel OS's, or Intel will need to find
 a way to do it in a compatible fashion, or Intel will abandon the professional
 market.
 Since so much of Intel's revenue is NOT the home user PC market, I don't
 see that last happening, neither do I see QNX going away anytime soon.

 Quite a bit of "free" ( as in FSF free ) software has been ported to QNX, and
 functions very well.
 The QNX port of GCC and G++, for instance, simply contain a "free" license
 along with, as a part of the port.

 With an uncontrolled system, such as Linux, this may be problematic in some
 ways, but I trust the Open Source community will find a way to deal with
 it in a non-crack way. 

 Micro$oft, on the other hand, will also find "a way" to deal with it, that I'm 
 sure will be fraught with more than its share of problems, since their
 primary market is not the professional.

-- 
Cowboy

http://cowboys.homeip.net

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your
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