Microsoft Licensing Fee Intended To Reduce Hobbyists

BokLM writes "Microsoft's Amir Majidimehr, Corporate VP of the Windows Digital Media Division, explained at a DRM conference in London why they require a license fee from device makers." From the article: "According to Amir, the fee is not intended to recoup the expenses Microsoft incurred in developing their DRM, or to turn a profit. The intention is to reduce the number of licensees to a manageable level, to lock out 'hobbyists' and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with."

Re:Things haven't changed since 1976...

[mopslik]

'll paraphrase the above for you in fewer words.

Interesting. I don't see one instance of Billy G mentioning:

• that hobbyists should not make software
• that software other than Billy's ruins the industry
• that free software is bad

What I do see is a screed claiming that:

• stealing software does not reward financially-motivated software makers
• stealing software does not motivate certain software makers into further delevoping said software

So how is that paraphrasing again?

Come on. I'm not fan of Billy G, but you can't honestly claim that the paragraph above says what you say it does.

Re:Things haven't changed since 1976...

[CastrTroy]

No, what's he's saying is don't steal software just to write your own. Thanks to people like him, we now have many free tools and can write our own software without paying, and without stealing. If you truly think that a product is worth using, then pay what they are charging. If you don't think it's worth what they are asking, then don't use it.

This is not an MS apology

[brontus3927]

However, this is done quiet often in the distribution world. Most software distributors I've dealt with require an application payment. I don't actually agree with the strategy, but it's done so that they only have to deal with "serious" companies.

Now the major difference is these distributors have competition, but the only competetion to protected WMA/V DRM is Apple's FairPlay, which only Apple gets to use.

Also realize that, in effect, this is exactly what the DVD-CCA does. Only issues liscences to people who agree to play by their restrictive terms.

On a certain level MS probably also believes that their DRM will be cracked more easily/quickly if smaller, less "ethical" coders could get their hands on it. But it didn't do the DVD people much good. IIRC, DVD Jon was able to crack CSS after the cypher was anonymously leaked to him

Re:Read his entire letter...

[Angostura]

No, the post to which you are replying is right; your original post is a truly horrible "summary" and that post is no better.

He doesn't say he "is the best at doing it" - he says he has put a lot of time and effort in.

He doesn't say that "Free software is bad because he can't make money" - he says that he is not in the business of offering free software and the lack of sales is dissuading him further development work.

Hope that helps. It isn't that hard to comprehend.

Need to validate drivers

[SiliconEntity]

As I understand it the problem is that Microsoft has to validate submitted drivers to see that they follow the DRM rules and don't have any back doors to let content be extracted. This is a big job so they can't afford to do it for every driver that any person feels like submitting, opening themselves up to a sort of DOS attack. By charging a fee for submissions they limit their work to only people who are really serious about it, and shut out the merely curious and those who hate DRM and would try to monkey-wrench it.

Re:Another one?

[G-funk]

It's incorrect. You MAKE war on somebody, you are at war WITH a country. Even president Nookular's speach writers know you can't have a war against something.

Trusted Network Connect

[tepples]

There's competition now from the free software world.

Not if free software can't boot. Have you tried to run free software on a video game console without making modifications that are illegal in at least one major developed country? Even if free software is allowed to boot, it is likely not to be able to get an IP address because all the residential high-speed ISPs use Trusted Network Connect and only "trust" specific unmodified Microsoft and Apple operating systems. It could very well happen by 2015 [slashdot.org].

The developers will just go where they're welcome.

And if that no longer includes the Internet, then what happens?

Re:Remember the Microchannel?

[jonadab]

PCI was designed to use a bridge architecture so that PCI and ISA or EISA slots could appear on the same motherboard. In fact, just about *every* motherboard with PCI slots also had ISA or EISA slots for the first several years. Early models would have three or four legacy slots and one or two PCI; later models increased the number of PCI slots, added an AGP slot, and reduced the number of legacy slots until a typical board only had one of them, and eventually brave manufacturers started leaving them off altogether and going with all PCI (and AGP and maybe one AMR slot; AMR fortunately seems not to have lasted).

Remember: if your new tech is a major improvment, you can break compatibility with some things (e.g., your new kind of slot doesn't have to support the old kind of card in it) if you keep compatibility in other areas (in the case of PCI, BUS-level compatibility with having the other kind of slots on the board). It's breaking compatibility with everything at once that's fatal.

Of course, if your new tech is only a minor improvement, then the backward-compatibility requirements are more demanding.