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Tim O'Reilly Interview 366

Posted by michael 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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Tim O'Reilly Interview More

Tim O'Reilly Interview

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  • Still waiting... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TopShelf ( 92521 ) * on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:40PM (#6552734) Homepage Journal
    So when will we see /. Hacks ???
    • There IS an ORA book on running weblogs with SLASH [bookpool.com] (and no, the cover animal is not a goat [goatse.cx]).

      • Re:Still waiting... (Score:4, Funny)

        by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @04:49PM (#6554057) Journal
        Man, that must be the only time a post with a direct link to goatse.cx got modded up.

        You, sir, are a genius. I take my hat off to you.

        • Warning/disclaimer (Score:4, Informative)

          by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @05:01PM (#6554144) Journal
          Warning

          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.
    • So when will we see /. Hacks ???

      I just quoted one.
    • Attempted sig hack!

      Let's see if it works.

      Sorry for any annoyance this may cause...
      • Interesting results. I wonder if it looks the same to everyone else out there as it does to me. Whenever I change my sig, the post updates to the new sig.

        I was trying to post with a sig under 120 characters, containing more than 50 carriage returns. Just to see what would happen. I didn't expect to have the sig update every time I changed it. FYI, from my point of view, the sig appeared in the post without the carriage returns, although it appeared correctly on my preferences page. Saving the prefere
  • Breaking up Monopolies NEVER works.

    What would work is to LIMIT !!! their share of the MARKET as a penalty and allow competition to unfold. If you need evidence of breaking up a monopoly failures , look at the baby bells.

    • Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up. (Score:5, Informative)

      by amerinese ( 685318 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:54PM (#6552844)
      The breakup of AT&T in the 80s was not so much of a failure as much as an imperfect success. Certainly in the long-distance markets, competition from MCI and Sprint, and since the late 90s any generic startup, brought insanely low prices for long distance calls. I would argue that it is still unknown how there can be healthy competition in the local phone access markets, although perhaps the rise of VoIP and broadband access will lead to alternatives. I guess this is obvious, but if Microsoft were not a monopoly, then one thing that might happen is Linux support for Office and Outlook. It may also lead them to provide more open format programs so that the MS OS company would want to foster more competition and better quality programs running on top of it, and the MS Office company would want to do the same on the OS side.
    • The only real solution to the MS monopoly is to force them to completely open their APIs and, especially, their file formats. Then anyone who wants to compete truly can, and the end user isn't stuck with their data held hostage in a proprietary format.

      Too simple a fix for the legal geniuses to figure out, I guess.

  • Proofreading (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That should be http://www.stage4.co.uk/ - three Ws, not two.

  • Repost of the interview - it's already Slashbotted (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:44PM (#6552769)
    Tim O'Reilly interview: Digital Rights Management is a Non-starter

    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)

    by Anonymous Cowdog ( 154277 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:46PM (#6552782) Journal
    He thinks the experience of software protection in the 1980's shows DRM will fail.

    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)

      by *weasel ( 174362 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:56PM (#6552861)
      the data that gets sent to a drm system will be saved, cracked and distributed to open systems.
      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.
      • The Effects of DRM WILL effect the common man. He will be trapped into the scheme where he doesn't own anything and is utterly powerless.

        These are the same people that cant stop the VCR from flashing 12:00.

        They make up the majority of the market.

        WE will get around it, but the majority wont, thus DRM will succeed in general and destroy a lot of things we take for granted now, like free speech and privacy..

        • Re:DRM will effect the common users regardless (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          These are the same people that cant stop the VCR from flashing 12:00

          If you offered them a vhs tape which when inserted set the clock, then their vcr wouldn't flash 12:00. Can't be done with vhs tapes, but can with software.

          If script kiddies have taught us anything, it is that a bunch of technically clueless people can wield technically savvy tools.

        • Re:DRM will effect the common users regardless (Score:4, Funny)

          by byolinux ( 535260 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:35PM (#6553151) Journal
          Excuse me, are you saying that 12:00 doohickey does something?
        • Those are the people who, by their current inaction, disinterest and lack of education (on the matters at hand), demonstrate a distinct lack of interest in free speech and privacy anyway.

          So they likely won't really care when DRM constricts them. Sure, they may say, "Gee, how come I can't make my own CDs" but then a new reality show will come on NBC and they'll move on.

          In the meantime, those of us who ARE interested in such things as privacy and free speech will continue to fight the good fight, continue

      • Re:DRM viability (Score:5, Funny)

        by Cyno ( 85911 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:36PM (#6553161) Journal
        dvd's are vastly more copy-protected than vhs, and they were adopted - for very good reasons

        Yeah, they're easier to copy.

      • Re:DRM viability (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ithicine ( 692742 )
        palladium's only hope for adoption, is in possible restrictions on running unsigned code.

        Even if palladium restricted unsigned code, it should be very easy to slip hidden code intended to break DRM into a seemingly valid package waiting to get signed. The only way to prevent this is to inspect the source code, but obviously, this approach would never work. Anyone who's traced program execution knows this is time consuming work; to exhaustively audit all software packages is simply impossible. It's lik

    • Re:DRM viability (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rgmoore ( 133276 ) * <glandauer@charter.net> on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:59PM (#6552887) Homepage
      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.

      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.

    • Re:DRM viability (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RevMike ( 632002 ) <revMike@gmail. c o m> on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:00PM (#6552897) Journal
      If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.

      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.

      • >Consumers will reject excessively onerous DRM.

        Sure, but look at the mess that windows XP activation is. It randomly goes off at work and even something as trivial as a NIC change makes it go into "piracy mode." Hell, all they need to do now is make the speakers yell out, "Step away from the box, this is in unlicensed version of windows," and their journey to the dark side will be complete.

        Users are locked into Microsoft - equipment, mindshare, software, etc - so they really don't have a choice.

        If t
    • DRM will fail eventually, it's up to the Big vendors to get it in quickly so that anti-DRM groups won't have time to involve the consumers.

      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)

      by sulli ( 195030 ) * on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:06PM (#6552954) Journal
      And fanboys, listen up: quit buying XBoxes to put Linux on them! You know that's just your excuse to /. so you can feel ok about subscribing to XBox Live.

      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.

      • And fanboys, listen up: quit buying XBoxes to put Linux on them! You know that's just your excuse to /. so you can feel ok about subscribing to XBox Live.
        I totally agree with this, but I still want one. I want to play Apex racing. It's something I enjoy. Racing games just have a nice little sweet spot in my heart, and the PC just falls short because you either have NFS or Nascar games. There is nothing as involved as Apex racing (or Auto Modelista) for the PC.

        So what am I going to do? Buy an Xbox, a
        • I was about to reply the exact same thing, except mention the upcoming Project Gotham game that makes me excited instead of Apex racing (are they comparable?). I care about DRM issues, but I also like to enjoy my time. Microsoft, with its Xbox, is providing reasonable enough entertainment value for the money, so why shouldn't I buy it? For Moral reasons?

      • Every time you buy an XBox... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Lendrick ( 314723 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @03:39PM (#6553550) Homepage Journal
        ...God kills a kitten.

        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. :)
        • Sigh. It's not true. What do you think loses Microsoft more money: an X-Box that doesn't get sold or an X-Box that does get sold?

          It _might_ be possible that Microsoft loses money on the X-Box, but I'd wager that only a tiny part of that is on hardware costs. The rest is to amortize R&D, marketing, administrative support, etc.

    • Re:DRM viability (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:19PM (#6553048) Homepage Journal
      IMO, it's a political issue, not a technical one. Any DRM system, whether it operates at the level of the file, the disk, or the whole OS, is hackable. But the difference between then and now is that software manufactures weren't getting Congress to pass laws that made it likely you'd spend more time in prison for cracking copy protection than you would for committing murder. Now that the entertainment industry is trying to do just that -- and, in large part succeeding -- the software industry's 80's experiences may just not be that relevant.
    • If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.

      Which, if you read the article, is exactly what O'Reilly is predicting.

      TheFrood

    • It must resist all attachs, and then some (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pac ( 9516 ) <paulo...candido@@@gmail...com> on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:50PM (#6553252)
      It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of

      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...

  • Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word? (Score:5, Funny)

    by GreenCrackBaby ( 203293 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:50PM (#6552810) Homepage
    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.

    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"

  • Macromedia and Flash (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:51PM (#6552817)
    Well, I've just joined the Macromedia board of directors, so that may tell you something about the importance I place on Macromedia. It's important for Flash to become more open and more standard

    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)

      by mblase ( 200735 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @03:02PM (#6553332)
      Macromedia seems more and more willing to play proprietary.

      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.

    • SVG (Score:2)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )
      Why push macromedia into opening flash when we already have a better, more capable, fully open, w3c recommended substitute?

      • Re:SVG (Score:4, Informative)

        by mblase ( 200735 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @04:23PM (#6553823)
        Why push macromedia into opening flash when we already have a better, more capable, fully open, w3c recommended substitute?

        One word: ActionScript [oreilly.com]. SVG interactivity has a long way to go before it can touch the kind of interactions Flash can have.

  • Hmm, a Gibson and Tolkein fan and an expert (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zptdooda ( 28851 ) <deanpjm&gmail,com> on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:52PM (#6552826) Journal
    ... in his field of vision

    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)

    by Boromir son of Faram ( 645464 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:54PM (#6552843) Homepage
    Mr. O'Reilly, what do you see in the future of technical publishing? I know a lot of hackers swear by traditional "dead tree" volumes, but it also seems like your company's competitively priced electronic publishing program is off to a rearing start. Do you foresee an end to paper technical books? How do WiFi and tablets fit into the future of technology publishing?

  • So right on some points... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by botzi ( 673768 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:55PM (#6552850)
    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.

    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....

    • movies these days are hidoeously expensive to produce and even more expensive to promote.
      suppose they wanted to recieve the same profits from you seeing it in a theater once on a DVD sale. how much ould it cost? lets say they make $3 off every one who walked into a theater and they would like to make the same off each DVD.
      The cost of production on a DVD is higher than a cd and they generaly contain a lot of high quality printing and packaging so the price per unit may be as high as $2. This gives us a sitt
      • I agree, DVD's are a good price these days. Some stuff comes in a bit high at $25 Cdn, but if you're patient you can get it for $20. Plus there are a crap load of older movies for anywhere from $8 to $20. Of course they can make some extra gravy selling SE versions for the hardcore fans.

        I personally have no problems with DVD pricing these days either.
    • Thank you. I also can't wait to pay for fast downloads of good music in a completely DRM-free (and preferable patent-free) format. And I really think it can happen.

      RIAA has lied to us about what they use DRM for, and too many people believe it. DRM absolutely does not combat piracy in any way, shape, or form. Piracy will always be possible, and at present it's pretty easy. DRM is about limiting fair use, and nothing more. What RIAA is only now slowly learning is that limiting fair use doesn't sell.

      • Thank you. I also can't wait to pay for fast downloads of good music in a completely DRM-free (and preferable patent-free) format. And I really think it can happen.

        Try emusic.com. It's not patent free, but you do get plain old mp3s. completely DRM free.

  • the truth (Score:4, Insightful)

    by radiumhahn ( 631215 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:56PM (#6552860)
    the worst thing they could do to microsoft is make it a regulated public utility. Of course that would cause so much fear in the business world we would have an even worse economy.
    • Right.

      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)

    by 0x12d3 ( 623370 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:59PM (#6552884)
    The guy could publish a volume on his slashdot interviews alone.

  • Tim O'Reily for President (Score:4, Insightful)

    by _Sambo ( 153114 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:00PM (#6552899)
    Reading that article was like going to the oracle and partaking of pure knowledge. Tim O'Reilly has the brains to shape the future. I'd vote for him for just about any public office. He has a global-centric, practical approach to business, economics and his words make a lot of sense.
    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!
  • In my opinion, as good as (or even better than) the interview itself was an article by Tim O'Reilly that he linked to in one of his answers: Piracy is Progressive Taxation" [openp2p.com]. He has some excellent insights into piracy, and makes several very good points and some interesting comparisons. One of his main points is that free services have been historically replaced by higher quality paid services (ISPs being a prime example). Well worth the read.

  • Developer Communities (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Felonius Thunk ( 168604 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:03PM (#6552921) Journal
    I'm interested in seeing what O'reilly can do with running Sun (and others!?) developer community sites. Imagine an MSDN or TechNet that's organized enough to find what you need on! Of course, MS would never swallow its pride and let O'reilly do that.

    I was also hoping to hear that there would be more in the ... Cookbook series. I'm a big fan of learning from well-developed samples. O hwell, maybe he can make Flash scripting something more fun and worth playing with.

  • Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:03PM (#6552925) Homepage Journal
    An article from Tim O'Reilly's IT Career Center [oreillynet.com] quotes the CATO Institute as saying:
    H-1B workers create jobs for Americans by enabling the creation of new products and spurring innovation. High-tech industry executives estimate that a new H-1B engineer will typically create demand for an additional 3 to 5 American workers.
    So, Tim, when will we be getting paid enough to buy our own Segways?

    • Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      H1B is better than paying some schmuck in India -- but only because the H1B needs to buy goods and services in the US, pay taxes, etc. so at most 25% of H1B's salary might get shipped back to his thrid world.

      When outsourced to a service center, most of the money leaves our economy for good.

    • I don't understand the lash against H1-B visa holders (I'm one myself) - The argument I keep hearing is that they are cheaper than US workers and thus drive down the wage for US tech workers. In my experience this just isnt the case.

      Here in the NY / NJ area I know about 20 H1-B visa holders and we're are all paid very well. It's definitely not cheaper to hire us than to hire US workers. We're hired because we have great skills that are difficult to find in the US. (Try foreign language skills and internat

  • DRM won't fail completely (Score:5, Interesting)

    by semanticgap ( 468158 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:04PM (#6552940)
    We haven't seen them yet, but I bet pretty soon we'll see PC's for sale that can only run Windows (this will be enforced by hardware) - don't know how that will affect the music business, but I am sure this is a card that Microsoft is waiting to play at the right time to make even more money.

    P.S. In one of the questions in the article it says "should of" - isn't that, like, really bad English...?
    • We haven't seen them yet, but I bet pretty soon we'll see PC's for sale that can only run Windows (this will be enforced by hardware) - don't know how that will affect the music business, but I am sure this is a card that Microsoft is waiting to play at the right time to make even more money.

      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.

  • Microsoft has many advantages, but far from a lock on the future. The days of their operating system monopoly are over. They've been saying this, and working furiously to enter new markets, but no one but them seems to realize that this isn't just legal posturing but an accurate representation of the new world we're all facing.

    What a load of crap. Try walking into any big company and suggesting that you should be able to run linux on your desk.

    I work at a company which is extraordinarily pro-linux for

    • It really depends on what you're doing with your machines at work. I gave Win2K the boot in 2001 in favor of Linux. The 1 missing link I needed (a Nortel VPN client for Linux) was finally brought to Linux by Netlock and that was the end of that. IT gave me some push back but all it took was a "Don't worry, I won't call you guys with any Linux specific issues". The first bit required some adjustment since some tools I used had to be "replaced" but all in all, I'm more productive now and that's the way it sho
    • ummm... actually developer jobs (like mine) are some of the easiest jobs to convert to OSS on the desktop.

      and i love working w/ linux! :-P

    • Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bogie ( 31020 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @03:09PM (#6553363) Journal
      "because it's fundamentally impossible (STILL) to run a business any other way"

      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.
    • Hmmm. Modded at 5, insightful? Well, even though I agree with the basic premise, that MS is effectively a monopoly, I will still disagree with your specific assertion. Let me give a little anecdotal evidence, and since I'm not giving out sensitive information, I will name names =)

      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
    • It might not be but it smells like a troll. Nonetheless I will take a bite.

      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
    • You are nuts.

      I am using RH9 on my desktop RIGHT NOW. To claim that what I am doing is "fundamentally impossible" is just foolish.

      Perhaps the mega-corps can't do it now, but that's as much office politics, policies and management issues than technical or monopolistic ones.

      Also, just to drive home the point, go look up how many of us work in SMALL companies compared with the number working in LARGE companies. Small wins.

      "No Reasonable Alternative" is just horse shit. OpenOffice and Gnumeric allow me to

    • What a load of crap. Try walking into any big company and suggesting that you should be able to run linux on your desk.

      The fact that I work at a big-10 university has something to do with this, I'm sure, but I'm running RH9 on my laptop right now. Why is that important to you? Because I'm a manager, not a programmer. And I find RH9 to be very productive and useful for me. Granted, I manage the staff who admin our UNIX servers (Linux, AIX, Solaris) but no one manages my laptop for me.

      On top of that,

    • I would agree that Microsoft still has a monopoly on consumer desktops, but
      in my department, Windows desktops are limited to mostly admin, business types,
      and a couple developers.I would imagine that the majority of the rest of the
      company (Fortune 150ish) runs windows, but it isn't dictated to us.

      Most of what we develop is platform agnostic and so we're seeing more and
      more Linux boxes running in the field since they are cheaper to build, easier
      to remotely maintain, and rock solid.

      This is how the Microsoft

  • some revisionist history here... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by deanj ( 519759 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:14PM (#6553010)
    There's some revisionist history happening in that article. UUNET didn't cause UUCPnet to disappear. It was around for a looooong time after UUNET got started.

  • Personally, (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Phoenix666 ( 184391 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:20PM (#6553054)
    I hope the content companies don't thrive online. I look forward to seeing them die off. Four years ago I thought that if they switched to something like what iTunes is now that they would make wads more cash, and music fans would be far better off. But they've done too much wrong for there to be any way out.

    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)

    by corbosman ( 136668 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:45PM (#6553222) Homepage
    No matter what Tim O'Reilly says, ive always had a soft spot for him. In 1993 I was sitting in a train going from London to Heathrow and I was wearing a Legion of Doom T-shirt.

    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)

    by tds67 ( 670584 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:48PM (#6553233)
    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.

    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)

    by CoyoteGuy ( 524946 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @03:00PM (#6553318)


    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 .mp3 and burn the fricken cd.
  • I liked how O'Reilly managed to compare Microsoft to Mordor and Mill Gates to Sauron with a rather deft comment:
    The question is what kind of operating system it will be -- a "one ring to rule them all" OS like Windows, or a "small pieces loosely joined" OS like Linux and the existing suite of internet and web technologies.
    It is an accurate representation, as Windows does provide a more rigid framework, yet allows for so many more interpretations!

  • not that lengthy (Score:5, Funny)

    by geekd ( 14774 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @03:11PM (#6553377) Homepage
    a lengthy interview

    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)

    by isomeme ( 177414 ) <cdberry@gmail.com> on Monday July 28, 2003 @03:28PM (#6553489) Journal
    Quoth Tim:
    ...Apple's music service, the closest yet to a system that users feel is fair and usable.
    I've been using Listen Rhapsody for many months, and find it eminently fair, extremely usable, and generally kick-ass. I stream what I want to hear on a whim, and can burn most tracks for the same price as iTunes if I need a portable copy. Why are people treating iTunes as something new when Rhapsody has been doing it successfully for a year or more?
    • Why did people treat the iPod as something new when more capable devices (like Creative's Nomad) had been out for a year or more?

      It's the same reason people in the fashion world act like Calvin Klein invented underpants - it's a trendy brand name.

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