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Tim O'Reilly Interview
Posted by
michael
on Mon Jul 28, 2003 01:39 PM
from the talking-head dept.
from the talking-head dept.
s4 news machine writes "The UK webcaster stage4 has published a lengthy interview with Tim O'Reilly in which he talks about why DRM will fail, Macromedia Central and the rise of webservices, and that Microsoft should have been broken up."
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Still waiting... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Still waiting... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Still waiting... (Score:4, Funny)
You, sir, are a genius. I take my hat off to you.
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Warning/disclaimer (Score:4, Informative)
Unless you're the kind of person who would like to see someone else's posterior in great detail (and have related nightmares and flashbacks for years to follow), do not click on that goat link.
I was once a victim of an apparently friendly "the stuff you want is here"-type message that went straight to that site. Boy, was I glad that nobody else was in the room at the time (and wasn't I disappointed that I wasn't elsewhere too). The whole incident taught me one important lesson - look at the address before you click that link - especially on Slashdot.
Don't click on the link. Especially if you've got your girlfriend, friends and/or family around. Or if you're at work. Especially if you like your job. Don't say I didn't warn you.
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Repost of the interview - it's already Slashbotted (Score:5, Informative)
First posted on 27/07/03
By mrspin
At last year's Apple World Wide Developer Conference (2002) I was lucky enough to attend a very informative talk by Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Publishing) in which he spelt out his theory of watching 'alpha geeks' in order to spot future trends and how web services, open standards and always on connectivity mean that the internet is replacing the desktop operating system. Just over a year on from that talk, Tim was kind enough to answer a few of our questions here on stage4.
We are going through a major paradigm shift in terms of the distribution of music and other digital content. What is your view on the future relevance of DRM technologies, Peer2Peer networks, and traditional media companies?
In the end, I think that DRM is a non-starter, at least as currently conceived. It's baffling to me that the content industries don't look at the experience of the software industry in the 80's, when copy protection on software was widely tried, and just as widely rejected by consumers. As science fiction writer William Gibson said, "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." The software industry was the first to face the issue that bits are easily copyable. It was also the first to try to create artificial boundaries to that copying. But because copy protection greatly inconvenienced customers, it slowed the adoption of any software that used it. We're seeing exactly the same thing now with music, where copy protection schemes have caused consumers to reject the crippled offerings of the commercial online music services.
And it's just foolish, because we have many counter examples of free services being replaced by higher quality paid services. A good example is the ISP industry. In the late 80's, many of us in the computer industry got our email and usenet news via a cooperative dialup network called UUCP. Users agreed to have their computers call each other at specified times to exchange mail and news; it took about 3 days for a message to propagate from one end of the network to another. But as soon as Uunet, the best connected site on the usenet, started to offer higher quality commercial connectivity, the free uucpnet vanished in a matter of months. And of course, once Uunet switched to offering TCP/IP networking, the commercial internet was born.
This isn't to say that some mild access controls might not be appropriate. For example, ISPs require you to have a subscription account, and to identify yourself by logging in. But there are no cumbersome controls on what you can do after that point.
For this reason, I believe that the content industries will flourish online once they stop fighting their users and start offering them what they want at a price they think is fair. That's the way it works in every other field of commerce! And we're already seeing this with Apple's music service, the closest yet to a system that users feel is fair and usable. As soon as Apple rolls it out on Windows (or as soon as competing vendors learn the lessons Apple is teaching), we're going to see a whole new ballgame.
And as the content industries are discovering, existing copyright law is quite enough legal protection for them to put a stop to the most serious of copyright infringers. This is much the same lesson learned by software vendors.
I'm also quite clear that the question isn't whether P2P networks will spell the end of media companies. The question is whether the companies that succeed on the new medium will be upstarts or existing players. We saw this same dynamic on the web, where folks like Yahoo! and Gooogle and MSN, and even AOL despite its troubles, built substantial businesses because they learned the rules of the new medium rather than trying to force users into their old business models.
I strongly believe that publishing, as a role, is driven by the sheer math involved in millions of potential producers reaching hundreds of mi
DRM viability (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so. In the 80's, software publishers were attempting to do DRM on open systems. Not open in the sense of open source, but open in the sense of being hackable.
The work underway now is to make systems closed, so that DRM *will* be technically doable. It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of. It just has to be good enough to keep consumer behavior in check.
If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.
Re:DRM viability (Score:5, Insightful)
it's not an if. one could fairly easily save packets into a file stream on a modified proxy and then work on cracking the encryption; and even barring that, technical reasons have yet to bridge the analog gap (if its presented on a tube or piped to a speaker - it will be captured and reencoded.)
copy protected data -will- fail, unless the prices fall, or the features rise (or a combination) to the point that customers will look past it. (dvd's are vastly more copy-protected than vhs, and they were adopted - for very good reasons).
and even then - data will continue to be pirated. but most people won't bother, because pirating lowers the features, and increases the time, effort and hassle to the point that just buying it is a better solution.
palladium's only hope for adoption, is in possible restrictions on running unsigned code.
but ms is busier cozy-ing up to the media companies than worrying about what the customer wants.
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Re:DRM viability (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, they're easier to copy.
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Re:DRM will effect the common users regardless (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:DRM viability (Score:5, Insightful)
OTOH, the software protection schemes of the 1980's were dealing with comparatively primitive approaches to distributing the deprotected software. Today it's not enough to prevent most people from being able to bypass the DRM. You have to do that and make the system so that the few people who can bypass the DRM can't pass it out to the rest of the world using a system like Napster. That means either locking down systems to the point that they can't run anything that isn't signed (which kills backward compatibility among other problems) or playing whack-a-mole with file "sharing" systems. The first is unlikely to happen because of consumer resistence, and the second is technically very, very difficult.
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Re:DRM viability (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't you remember having to keep a box next to each PC with the disks for that PC's copy of Lotus 1-2-3, since if the software needed to be updated, you couldn't use any copy, but the actual disk that was used to install it?
Consumers will reject excessively onerous DRM.
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Free Software eats the foundations of DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
We can counter DRM by lobbying our governments, but we also deaden it's affect when we decide that we will only use software when we can:
0. look into it's workings
1. recompile it to make sure we're being shown the real code
2. alter it if we don't like what it does, and
3. distribute altered versions so that these freedoms benefit everyone, not just programmers.
We must b
So don't buy closed systems. (Score:5, Insightful)
Stick with the PC and it will all be good in the 'hood. Help the marketplace decide by not investing in stupid-ass closed architectures.
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Every time you buy an XBox... (Score:5, Interesting)
Er, no, that's not it.
Every time you buy an XBox, Microsoft loses money. They make it back on game licenses. So if you buy one, stick Linux on it, and don't buy any games, you're actually doing them (Microsoft) a disservice, as well as getting a PC at below wholesale price.
Of course, this requires a certain amount of restraint in not purchasing games.
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Re:DRM viability (Score:5, Interesting)
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It must resist all attachs, and then some (Score:5, Insightful)
But it does, or else it won't keep consumer behavior in check. It is enough for one Chinese hacker or one Bulgarian hobbist to break the protection once, the networks do the rest: in the wonderful digital world we live in, once broken, forever broken, everywhere. I can't replicate a shoplifting, but I can program a code-breaking software that will break a given protection everytime.The whole point is that Joe Clueless Consumer does not have to be a crypto expert, just a Web amateur capable o downloading the "codec" that will play everything again. And Joe C. Consumer will...
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Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word? (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it now....
Clippy: "I see you are trying to play that new Brittany Spears CD! Please turn to page 12 of the CD insert, 3rd paragraph down, and tell me what the 3rd word is before I'll let you play it"
Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word? (Score:5, Funny)
Clippy: "I see you're trying to play the new Brittany Spears CD! Please look in to the retinal scanner, and place your thumb into the DNA Sampler so that the RIAA can verify that you have been authorized for a 'One Time Listening License' for the price of $19.99.
Parent
Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word? (Score:5, Interesting)
*** Error - Input doesn't compute.
There's no way to fill 12 pages with content about Britney Spears, especially not TEXT.
I'm more concerned about the effect DRM will have on *public* rights, including fair use and archiving. How is the Library of Congress going to store the data for future use when the DRM authentication server and key generator no longer exists in 2045? It's hard enough converting old 8" floppies to newer media, but this is going to kill any kind of public archives.
Regards,
--
*Art
Parent
Macromedia and Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
Try getting to the dreamweaver exchange with opera or without flash installed on IE. Just because I bought dreamweaver doesn't mean I'm with the flash program. Seems Macromedia are going that Microsoft route trying to jam flash down my throat as a requirement for support. Macromedia seems more and more willing to play proprietary.
P.S. Dreamweaver improved much more as a cold fusion target, than any of the other languages.
Re:Macromedia and Flash (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, part of the problem is the browsers. A lot of the magic of Flash involves being able to connect it to the HTML page using JavaScript. Unfortunately, Mozilla (and, I believe, Opera) are either unable or unwilling to support the JS-Flash bridge that Netscape 4 and IE handle seamlessly.
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Re:SVG (Score:4, Informative)
One word: ActionScript [oreilly.com]. SVG interactivity has a long way to go before it can touch the kind of interactions Flash can have.
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Hmm, a Gibson and Tolkein fan and an expert (Score:4, Interesting)
From the interview:
"That being said, the net does lead to a breakdown of national boundaries and legal systems, and there's going to be some interesting adaptation over the years, as we move inexorably to a global cyberculture."
a "one ring to rule them all" OS
My guess is we have a fair number of people around here cut from the same cloth.
But then he suggests Air Guitar by Dave Hickey and Moneyball by Michael Lewis.
Maybe he was just trying to help the interview reader relate?
excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
So right on some points... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's so plainly correct.
The moment the music industry(and even Hollywood) realize that _YES_ they should provide a legitime way to gather entertaiment content from the web, but _NO_, DRM should not be a part of it(at least not in the way they intend to do it at the moment) the next step will be made.
I'm a poor student, but I *will* pay some fee(consider that it should be significantly lower than the price of a DVD for example) as long as there's no even a slightest notion of DRM protection in what I get.
Anyway, I also think that he IS right, but to conclude: NEVER gonna happen. He forgets that in his example both: corporations and consumers have had the same interest, and DRM looks like the first time when that's not the case....
the truth (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the truth (Score:3)
You give industry a choice:
1) MS becomes a utility (as I agree they should given the current conditions)
2) Support breaking them up, thereby changing the current conditions.
again? geesh... (Score:5, Funny)
Tim O'Reily for President (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm suprised that he's not on the Microsoft board of directors to help them see what's coming down the pike.
He mentions SETI-like applications that do not depend on a single piece of hardware, but do depend on connectivity to other devices. The idea of an Internet OS is very interesting. In a few years we won't be booting up to an os, we'll be booting up to Slashdot to get the posting fix.
Huzzah!
Excellent link in the interview (Score:5, Interesting)
Developer Communities (Score:3, Interesting)
I was also hoping to hear that there would be more in the
Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs! (Score:3, Insightful)
DRM won't fail completely (Score:5, Interesting)
P.S. In one of the questions in the article it says "should of" - isn't that, like, really bad English...?
Re:DRM won't fail completely (Score:3, Insightful)
Wakey, wakey.
They're called XBoxes, and "only" run a modified windows.
Now they run linux (and various other stuff) as well, though M$ wishes they didn't.
some revisionist history here... (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the end of the content companies will not be the end of art or music. There will always be art and music as long as people want to create and be entertained. But instead of content companies that own you the artist body and soul, they will be publicists and advertisement companies that work for you. They will also be much smaller with no monopoly power.
Artists will eventually realize that through a system like iTunes they can cut out the RIAA and take the lion's share of the price of a download themselves. Services like Kazaa will help fans who are too risk averse find out about new music for free, and a number of them will probably opt to spend the money they would once have spent on CDs on concert tickets and merchandise instead. So that too will benefit artists.
And without a cartel brainwashing the public into thinking Britney Spears is good music, there will be a lot more diversity and a lot more creativity out there. I believe that if we can beat back the RIAA and their employees in Congress there's a new cultural golden age out there waiting for us.
Tim O'Reilly (Score:3, Interesting)
This is 1993, so your mom wasn't on Internet yet.
This guy starts talking to me, asking me if Im involved in Internet pointing at my shirt. So I say I am, co-founder of a dutch ISP (XS4ALL) and involved with Hacktic, a dutch hacker crew. He says he's Tim O'Reilly. _THE_? Yeah..
He was quite cool to talk to, and he gave me a sendmail shirt. Later he mailed me saying his kids loved it that someone recognised their dad
Ok, enough about the good old days,
Cor
Good Point (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a good point. I remember a game in the 1980s for the Atari 800 that I cracked by changing a couple of bytes on the floppy (replaced with 6502 machine-language NOP instructions) that made it skip the copy-protection mechanism. I needed to do that so I could have a fair use floppy disk backup of the game that I purchased. I don't think copy protection will ever work. Better to try to market your product in a way that makes it hard to resist buying, like value-added features that you can only get by purchasing the product.
My answer to DRM on audio publishing (Score:5, Interesting)
I will create an add-in box that captures audio output from a PC or a DRM enabled device, and redirect it back to my pc's audio encoding system as
not that lengthy (Score:5, Funny)
It was short to medium length. The submitter must have a short attention span. Damn kids these days.
When I was a kids we had to read "War & Peace" in 3 hours, uphill, both ways!
iTunes vs Rhapsody (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Too simple a fix for the legal geniuses to figure out, I guess.
Re:Uh? (Score:5, Funny)
Not that it stopped them, unfortunately.
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Re:"DRM will fail" my ass! (Score:5, Informative)
See the CD Bookshelves [oreilly.com] which are in open formats but don't use DRM. That doesn't mean they're not copyrighted, though. You're expected to do the right thing but you're not forced to do it.
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Re:"DRM will fail" my ass! (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish all booksellers would have content online. Even if it's just every other chapter. I'd buy a lot more books then.
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Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly" (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Because your developers are 100% Windows users and can't live without it? How does that prove anything?
According to you, your company represents every single company in the world and no other possibility exists. How is that possible?
Linux has been a viable desktop for years now. It all depends on what your using it for. But then since your company doesn't use it as a desktop nobody else possibly can. What strange logic.
"but there is No Reasonable Alternative To Windows On The Desktop"
Again with the proclamations. You know saying something over and over doesn't mean its going to come true right? Well since its already been proven that some companies do in fact run linux I'd say you don't really have a leg to stand on here. The point is that your not wrong when you say most companies use windows, but your dead wrong to suggest that it's not possible to survive without it.
Also btw in case you hadn't heard there is a little thing called OSX.
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Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly" (Score:3, Informative)
In the last three years I have worked primarily for two large companies. At Raytheon's (enormous defense/aerospace contractor) Mt Laurel New Jersey facility everyone used Solaris desktops. A Windows terminal server was maintained
Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly" (Score:3, Insightful)
I run Linux at home all day long every single day for both work and play. The biggest problems I run into are some web pages that do active content written specifically for IE. Not such a big deal really.
It absolutely IS an alternative on the desktop to Windows. I think what you are trying to say is that for many users it can't operate as a replacement because software XYZ can't run on Linux and the user HAS to have that for wh