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Re: usefulness of source

On 24/02/2006, at 7:03 AM, email@hidden wrote:
It makes me sad to not be back in the good old days (which apparently were
even more good before I came into this picture) but time moves on,
relationships change and the way I work with Mac OS X has as well. I've
really gone back to linux and FreeBSD and other far more esoteric operating
systems for my OS experimentation fun. Just as Apple seemingly left me
behind, I've moved on as well.

I think this is bit like the time that Scott McNealy said something like "You have no privacy. Get over it."

I still think it's a bit of a shame but Apple's a business and needs to do
what they think is right for them and their stakeholders first.

I have my suspicions that what is the core of all this is Hollywood and the record companies, who seem to have persuaded the US legislature to enact pernicious legislation the sole purpose of which is to greatly increase the profits of the large multi nationals that control entertainment. Going forward, if Apple want to continue to produce systems that handle vision and music, they will need to have DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) built into the core of the system including but not limited to the kernel. Of course they have some self-interest here: not wanting MacOS to run on ordinary PCs, although that could probably have been done at a higher level in proprietary code which has never been part of Darwin.

They are presumably not going to bother with this for the PPC hardware which is why there is no problem with those sources. However, to release the x86 sources, they need a methodology to strip any DRM related code out before release. This is presumably a non- trivial task. Hence the delay. Apple don't want to be seen as having leaked vital information for hackers.

Ars Technica had a really good article this week berating the computer and home entertainment industries for putting up with all this strife from a content industry that is a fraction of their size. After all the hardware companies could club together and go into business making content. They could pay the artists more and release products free of mindless DRM junk. I reckon that might bring Hollywood into line.

Bill Northcott
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