On Tuesday 02 July 2002 19:17, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> Take a look at
> http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/301-350/00320_global_civil_societ
>y.html and consider what we might be able to do with Squeak. But do it
> quickly before it is unlawful...

It seems that they want to pay 150 Euros to who makes a drawing of the 
coolest looking laptop computer. There is not reason why this mock up 
can't be shown with Squeak on its screen...

> PS No joke. If we can't do _something_ to stop this sort of utter
> evil _we_ will be the piglet rotating on the spit. Forever.

Throughout the 1990s, I considered a design very similar to what 
Microsoft is proposing. The idea itself isn't evil, though it certainly 
can be used that way.

What I wanted was a way for people to make money while Squeaking. Sure, 
the infrastructure should be Free Software, but it you make a great 
little project available to others why shouldn't you be paid for it? 
Otherwise we get into the situation we are now, where the best 
Squeakers are unemployed or have to have an unrelated job/project. 
Selling t-shirts is ok, but if your talent is programming you should be 
able to make money on that.

Getting people to pay per copy is complicated and keeps the software 
ecosystem from evolving, so an alternative is to pay per use (see 
Superdistribution http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/TTEF.html). A lot of 
people confuse this with Microsoft's "rentware" efforts, but in many 
ways it is the exact opposite. In any case, the original 
Superdistribution proposal required a "trusted platform" 
(http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/ElectronicProperty/MoriSuperdist.html).

In the end, I decided that it was a bad idea to use a technological 
solution for an ethical problem. Besides, having a hardware/software 
blackbox on an otherwise totally open system just felt wrong. But I 
still think allowing content creators to charge for the use of their 
masterpieces is a great idea. Without a Palladium-like platform, 
however, they won't be able to force anybody to pay.

I doubt that Hollywood would be very happy with such a scheme, but that 
is ok! One of the neat things about Squeakland is the idea that the 
users should create their own content. No clip art. No Quicktime 
blockbuster trailers. No multi-million dollar games. By building an 
alternative platform, that is what we will get whether we want it or 
not.

So the real proposal isn't to just make M$ irrelevant, but to also 
ignore the MPAA and RIAA. I am all for it, but will others find freedom 
worth the cost?

Let's not kid ourselves - consumers won't even notice Palladium and 
won't make much of a fuss when they do. Nobody I know, except for me, 
is bothered by those nasty DVD region codes, for example.

But what will Palladium mean for Squeak, really? First of all, some 
people on this thread expressed the fear that eventually a law might 
force this beyond the Intel platform. In the U.S., a bill has already 
been introduced to that effect:

  http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51275,00.html

This is kind of "sleeping" right now but should be taken into account. 
So U.S. Squeakers won't be able to count on neat ARM or FPGA based 
machines to save them. But while it might complicate SqueakNOS (it 
would have to get certified and that might be costly or impossible) I 
don't think it would effect Squeak running on Windows too much. The OS 
would be certified and external players would be able to play music and 
movies. Cross platform, native media would be limited to home grown 
content, as I explained above. Linux is probably an intended victim of 
Palladium and I won't try to guess how that would turn out. Same thing 
with Apple, though they are far more likely to join.

-- Jecel