brainwagon

Open source software owes its existence to the convergence of three technologies:

• Fast, cheap computer hardware
• Fast, cheap networking
• Cheap compilers

Inexpensive PC hardware provides the raw grist for programmers. GCC provided a reasonable way to program this hardware. Cheap networking allowed the fruits of their labors to be propagated to people all over the world.

We’d like to think that free software will prove to be a never ending resource, but I believe that open source software is in
serious danger of becoming extinct.

The first threat comes from the increasing complexity of PC hardware. As hardware becomes more advanced, it becomes
more and more complex. Each new generation of processors
and peripherals only builds on the complexity of those that came
before. Often new hardware is poorly documented or not documented at all, as hardware manufacturers believe that the inner workings of their hardware is important intellectual property.
We are already experiencing some of these difficulties, as many
advanced graphics cards are only supported in open source
systems by binary only closed drivers.

An even greater threat is the pressure being placed on the computer industry to support digital rights management (DRM) in new computing hardware. Up until now, the computer industry has largely resisted efforts by media companies to impose DRM because they fear consumer backlash. They realize that DRM offers absolutely no consumer
benefits, and consumers are unlikely to use products that
incorporate them.

That is of course, unless it is illegal to do otherwise.

Media companies and their lobbyists are seaking to promote legislation such as the laughably name
Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act.
The basic premise of this bill is that piracy is making media companies unwilling to produce new works for the Internet because they can’t make money. Because this new media doesn’t exist, there is little reason to upgrade and increase the availability of the Internet. Therefore we should mandate that computer and consumer electronics manufacturers must incorporate mandatory digital rights management into their products, to help prevent piracy, and to encourage the growth of the Internet.

There is a lot to not like about this bill, but for the purposes of this discussion I’ll focus on one: it will make the kind of computer that open source developers have known a loved a thing of the past. You will be unable to write programs which use your machine in the way that you want it to. It will also be illegal for you to have a machine that isn’t modified in this way.

The frightening thing is that it actually could come to pass. Let’s face it, the number of people who actually program their machines is a vanishingly small fraction of computer users. We leverage the buying power of the consumer market to equip ourselves with cutting edge computing power at relatively little cost. Without the consumer market, we’d be forced to buy relatively slow machines at relatively high cost, which certainly would cause a damper on open source software development, but it probably wouldn’t kill it. But to make it illegal to ship the kind of machines that we’ve enjoyed programming up to this point would kill open source software, or at least force it into a militant activity performed only by outlaws.