Open Source DRM? What does everyone think about it? Will Open Source
DRM ever catch up to MS DRM?
Will DRM ever be integrated into common LAMP applications?
(LAMP=Linux/Apache/MYSQL/PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby)
Here's Sun's latest initiative in Open Source DRM:
DReaM: Royalty-Free, Open Source DRM
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news...le.php/3529146
Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) is jumping into digital rights
management (define) with the launch of an open source version not
dependent on devices.
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and COO, announced the launch of the
Open Media Commons' DRM/everywhere (DReaM) project in order to kick off
the Progress & Freedom Foundation's annual summit in Aspen, Colo.
The intent of the project is to create a DRM standard that's
royalty-free and interoperable with other DRM technologies, similar to
Sun's work with the Liberty Alliance, an open community for the
federated identity industry.
The DRM technology created will be licensed under a Creative
Commons-based license, according to a statement by the Progress &
Freedom Foundation.
Here's what Linus Torvalds has to say regarding Open Source DRM:
http://authena.org/
Ok,
there's no way to do this gracefully, so I won't even try. I'm going to
just hunker down for some really impressive extended flaming, and my
asbestos underwear is firmly in place, and extremely uncomfortable.
I want to make it clear that DRM is perfectly ok with Linux!
There, I've said it. I'm out of the closet. So bring it on...
I've had some private discussions with various people about this
already,
and I do realize that a lot of people want to use the kernel in some
way
to just make DRM go away, at least as far as Linux is concerned. Either
by
some policy decision or by extending the GPL to just not allow it.
In some ways the discussion was very similar to some of the software
patent related GPL-NG discussions from a year or so ago: "we don't like
it, and we should change the license to make it not work somehow".
And like the software patent issue, I also don't necessarily like DRM
myself, but I still ended up feeling the same: I'm an "Oppenheimer",
and I
refuse to play politics with Linux, and I think you can use Linux for
whatever you want to - which very much includes things I don't
necessarily
personally approve of.
The GPL requires you to give out sources to the kernel, but it doesn't
limit what you can _do_ with the kernel. On the whole, this is just
another example of why rms calls me "just an engineer" and thinks I
have
no ideals.
[ Personally, I see it as a virtue - trying to make the world a
slightly
better place _without_ trying to impose your moral values on other
people. You do whatever the h*ll rings your bell, I'm just an engineer
who wants to make the best OS possible. ]
In short, it's perfectly ok to sign a kernel image - I do it myself
indirectly every day through the kernel.org, as kernel.org will sign
the
tar-balls I upload to make sure people can at least verify that they
came
that way. Doing the same thing on the binary is no different: signing a
binary is a perfectly fine way to show the world that you're the one
behind it, and that _you_ trust it.
And since I can imaging signing binaries myself, I don't feel that I
can
disallow anybody else doing so.
Another part of the DRM discussion is the fact that signing is only the
first step: _acting_ on the fact whether a binary is signed or not (by
refusing to load it, for example, or by refusing to give it a secret
key)
is required too.
But since the signature is pointless unless you _use_ it for something,
and since the decision how to use the signature is clearly outside of
the
scope of the kernel itself (and thus not a "derived work" or anything
like
that), I have to convince myself that not only is it clearly ok to act
on
the knowledge of whather the kernel is signed or not, it's also outside
of
the scope of what the GPL talks about, and thus irrelevant to the
license.
That's the short and sweet of it. I wanted to bring this out in the
open,
because I know there are people who think that signed binaries are an
act
of "subversion" (or "perversion") of the GPL, and I wanted to make sure
that people don't live under mis-apprehension that it can't be done.
I think there are many quite valid reasons to sign (and verify) your
kernel images, and while some of the uses of signing are odious, I
don't
see any sane way to distinguish between "good" signers and "bad"
signers.
Comments? I'd love to get some real discussion about this, but in the
end
I'm personally convinced that we have to allow it.
Btw, one thing that is clearly _not_ allowed by the GPL is hiding
private
keys in the binary. You can sign the binary that is a result of the
build
process, but you can _not_ make a binary that is aware of certain keys
without making those keys public - because those keys will obviously
have
been part of the kernel build itself.
So don't get these two things confused - one is an external key that is
applied _to_ the kernel (ok, and outside the license), and the other
one
is embedding a key _into_ the kernel (still ok, but the GPL requires
that
such a key has to be made available as "source" to the kernel).
Linus
http://authena.org/modules.php?op=mo...rder=0&thold=0
