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It's a dumb name, to be sure, especially in an open-source context where everyone knows what "DRM" is and will have an overwhelmingly negative reaction to it.
by ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
It's a dumb name, to be sure, especially in an open-source context where everyone knows what "DRM" is and will have an overwhelmingly negative reaction to it.
- resoluteteeth 3y agoAnyone who uses linux/freebsd will know what DRM actually means in this context
- selfhoster11 3y agoDoesn't make it any less annoying, from my own perception anyway. I have known about DRM standing for Direct Rendering Manager for years, but it's really annoying even today.
- Qwertious 3y agoSure, but it'll take a little longer to recognize the context, because the acronym is overloaded. It's like IPC. Or how "inflammable" means both "not flammable" and "extremely flammable".
- hooch 3y agoExcept DRM in this context is a Direct Rendering Manager [1] which is a slightly different struggle getting pixels onto the screen. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoLet's take a survey and ask people what "DRM" stands for. I would bet a decent amount of money that the copyguarding one wins out over the rendering-manager one.
- yrro 3y agoUnless you have a time machine, we can't go back and rename the subsystem.
- pxc 3y agoHow prominent was the phrase 'digital rights management' when Linux's direct rendering manager was created (Wikipedia says 1999)? The FSF's 'Defective by Design' anti-DRM campaign didn't start until 2006.
- bcx5k15 3y agonot at all, I recall that no one (outside of the music industry perhaps) used the phrase 'digital rights management' until iTunes added DRM to music in 2003/2004, other things like the copy protection for videotapes/DVDs/games were just generically called copyprotection, or other domain specific terms such as activation (in the case of things like windows XP), not DRM.