Read David Trowbridge‘s blog entry about the recent blogging campaign posting one of the AACS keys with interest. As someone who has to deal with software patents and DRM systems on an almost daily basis as part of my job I would have to say I disagree on his conclusion that such efforts have no value and should just be considered worthless online ‘whining’.

There was a similar thing happening with CSS back in the day, where people posted the DeCSS source code everywhere and put it on t-shirts etc. While it might not have caused the whole DRM eco-system to fail it did play a part in the content industry starting to question the value of DRM systems. If we get a similar story now with AACS it could be the decisive blow that ‘educates’ the content industry on the futility of pursuing DRM systems.

The fact that we have had DeCSS out there now for many years has also been a useful tool for countering many of the arguments made by for instance the DVD CCA, regarding why DRM systems are needed. In the DVD CCA FAQ there is a question about why CSS is necesarry. They are saying that without CSS the content industry would be hesistant to release their content. Well DeCSS has been out for a long while now and there is a long list of DVD rippers out there using it, available for all major operating systems, yet that fact doesn’t seem to have put a dampener on the willingness of the movie studios to release more DVD’s…..

So David might feel that the ‘Civil disobedience’ in regards to AACS is worthless, yet I say that discrediting the major DRM systems out there actually do serve a purpose in terms of educating people about the futility of such systems, and also demonstrates that the assumption that without effective DRM systems sales will collapse is a false one.

And being someone who has to deal with people doing hardware, software and content in this area I can tell you that the ‘educational effect’ of more and more DRM systems getting broken is slowly changing the mindset and level of understanding of the industry.

So while I as part of my work have to deal with the laws and regulations as they are today and have to work within the constraints they set that doesn’t mean I don’t respect the efforts of those being able to operate in less restrained ways than we can as a company. The world is a complex place and a working democracy is much more than just voting and mailing your local politician.

Well then you are in luck. Edward just pointed me to the budget airline bmibaby (pronounced ‘be my baby’) which offer budget fligths directly to Birmingham which will save you quite a bit of both time and money compared to flying into a London airport (cost me a total of 70€ in train tickets the last time going back and forth to Wolverhampton/Birmingham). If you are flying to London I do recommend Stanstead over Luton though, unless you are comfy with the UK public transport system as the train from Stanstead goes directly to Birmingham, while you need to switch twice when going from Luton by train.

Noticed that Miguel speculating about a Linux version of Silverlight. Personally I hope
we do not see such a announcement. Everytime Microsoft has promised Unix support its been done to rob their cross platform competitor of the argument and in the end not delivering. I remember Windows Media Player being announced for Unix back in the day when Microsoft where in the process of trying to kill off Real networks as a competitor in the streaming media space. In the end all they ever produced was a broken alpha release for Solaris and in the end they never released a final version for either Solaris or any other promised platform. Another example of such a sabotage targeted ‘port’ was Internet explorer for Unix, which Microsoft made as part of their effort to take down Netscape, which never came further than some hackish versions for Solaris and HP-UX before getting canceled.

Do we really want to see Microsoft try the same technique again? Sadly enough I doubt the mainstream press is observant enough to call Microsoft on their game even if its the Nth time they do it.

Came accross some old drawings made by Larry Ewing (the guy who created Tux) where he had tried making a GNOME mascot it seems. I hadn’t seen them before, but they are actually quite cute.

There are more sketches and animation variations available at:
Larry’s GNOME directory.

Would just like to remind all established project contributors that the GNOME Mentor Summer of Code deadline is approaching fast. In fact we want most mentors ‘signed up’ within two days. So if you haven’t signed up to be a mentor already do so quickly. If you already have signed up as a mentor please use the ‘request mentorship’ button to ask for mentorship of your relevant projects. Projects which do not have someone requesting mentorship for them within a few days will have less a chance of getting approved among the final projects than projects who only aquire a mentor at a later stage. You find information on how to apply for being a mentor on the Google Soc page.