DRM, Digital Rights Management, is a way to prevent end user from sharing multimedia. The MP3 file format is one of the easiest to enforce it on. WMA, Windows Media Audio, is just as easy to put it on, plus, it is a format developed by the "evil empire." There are several reasons Linux users don't like it, and even people in our classes hate it. That signifies something, hmmm...
OGG, the free music file format, is supported by many open source software, and you essentially cannot put DRM on it. It is an Open Format, supported by most Linux Distributions out of the box, and it is well compressed, good quality, and not rough around the edges.
The Napster Store now sells DRM- free MP3's. Napster has a web client, and can be available on Linux, Mac, and Windows. This is another good step towards getting rid of DRM, and I wonder if one band who will not be mentioned here, *cough*Metal*Cough*lica, will be convinced.
Nicholas Negroponte, with the OLPC group, has actually gone the Windows way with the XO, more and more people are being convinced that it is just another laptop project, and not an education project, and that it is to compete with Dell, HP, Etc. This really dissapoints me, I had a day with the XO, and thought it would be very good for third world countries, but Nicholas seems to not want to go that way. There are many people who have broken off from OLPC, and will continue to work on the Sugar UI, that, at least makes me a little bit happy.
On another note, at school we are having problems with Windows computers in one room, and I talked to other tech savvy students about the problem, and because they both like Linux, they would like to bring it further into these classes. More on this issue later.
No comments:
Post a Comment