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FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support DRM

459 points by mikegerwitz 12y ago

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blueskin_ 12y ago
The FSF would have good points, but then they ruin them with things like "or the issues that inevitably arise when proprietary software is installed on a user's computer.". Yes, DRM is bad, but not everything has or needs to be open source to treat its users ethically, and some people do need to make a living from their software. Not everything needs to be GPL to respect people's rights to do what they want with something they bought, not everything needs to be open source just because they like it that way, and above all, people should have a right to choose to install whatever they want, and distros should have the same right to choose to tell the user about closed source software when it would be helpful to them. If the end user didn't want to hear that, they can either ignore it, or use a FSF-endorsed linux distro like Trisquel. The fact that so few people do shows to me how most people are completely fine with having the ability to install what they want. Freedom may include giving others freedom to do things you personally don't like, but the FSF tends to think a single, ironically restricted set of freedoms to match their philosophy are all that everyone needs.
- jordigh 12y ago
  The FSF doesn't fight for open source. They're not the "open source foundation". That's someone else. Proprietary software is obviously not a requirement to make a living off software, unless you think Mozilla had been starving until now and that's why they have to put proprietary software in Firefox.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    So every random small developer or indie game studio can get a multibillion dollar partnership with google? As it is, Mozilla's relationship with Google is looking shakier every day, as from Google's perspective it's undercutting their own business with Chrome, while from Mozilla's perspective, they promote firefox as being a browser that respects privacy, and partnering with an organisation as fundamentally anti-privacy as Google undermines that. Yes, Mozilla needs funding, but I'd rather pay a one off fee to purchase firefox if it really became necessary. Firefox could then come with no bundled search engines[1], and by default direct the user to the mozilla addons page to select which they would like to add, perhaps with a predefined list of popular choices given prominence similarly to the microsoft browser choice screen that gave prominence to Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari, then had others listed if you cared to look further. I guess that whole argument is getting into the question of whether firefox is for power users or the drooling masses who wouldn't want to configure their search engines though. [1] I'd like to see it bundled with duckduckgo included, but I know that even if it came without any, many users would want to add google themselves. I respect their choice to in that case.
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      - blueskin_ 12y ago
        >Chrome isn't a business, so much as another way to search the web. But instead of automated crawlers it has people who will do the searching, do the crawling. Kind of ingenious if you think about it. Google will make more (indirect) money off the average chrome user than the average firefox user, simply because they get far more metrics, analytics and data from them to make a profile for advertising. Obviously, the average firefox user is likely to have higher technical skill so possibly go to some lengths to confound tracking attempts, but that is beside the point, especially since comparable privacy addons are generally available for chrome too, with the primary exception of NoScript. (Edit: NoScript itself for chrome may not exist, but there are still comparable addons). Back when google signed the Mozilla deal, they didn't have a browser, and the stream of data they get from directing firefox users' searches through google was and still is more profitable to them than letting mozilla pick another default and denying them that data.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  > and distros should have the sameright to choose to tell the user about closed osurce[sic] software when it would be helpful to them. Of course they should. That's why they have that right, and are using it. The FSF isn't stopping them; in fact, by supporting development of GNU, they're indirectly helping such distros. What point are you trying to make, that the Free Software Foundation should not complain about encroachments on Software Freedom?
- belorn 12y ago
  I think you do not understand how the free software movement work. Let me shine some light by rewriting your comment as if it was about a more commonly understood environmental issue. "Yes, pollution is bad, but not everything has or needs to be pollution-free to treat the environment fairly, and some products need be cheap enough to produce revenue. Not everything needs to be green to treat the environment fairly with stuff people have bought, not everything needs to be pollution-free just because they like it that way, and above all, people should have a right to choose to run whatever car they want! The fact that so few people do run pollution-free cars shows to me how most people are completely fine with driving the car they want." (btw, the FSF philosophy is the freedom to do anything except restricting other people freedom. If you want to define freedom as the right to restrict others then go ahead, but I don't).
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    Nice strawman. The clear indicator of a desperate "I don't like your point but can't directly refute it".
    - teddyh 12y ago
      As opposed to your comment, which contains an eloquent refutation of belorn’s comment? Don’t simply call people trolls or strawman-slayers, use good arguments to counter bad ones. Otherwise we get bad arguments countering bad arguments, followed by meta-arguments, tone arguments, etc – don’t let it happen. See this comment for example; Is this comment not better with the second paragraph than without it?
- dTal 12y ago
  It's not like they said "proprietary software is evil". They say "[issues] inevitably arise when proprietary software is installed on a user's computer." That's a very mild statement that's hard to argue with. >not everything has or needs to be open source to treat its users ethically The FSF's entire raison d'etre is to disagree with that statement, and they do so eloquently. If you have a different view, that's fine, but you need to engage with their arguments a bit more deeply than just contradicting the premise. >some people do need to make a living from their software People make a living selling all sorts of things. This has no bearing on the ethics of doing so. >most people are completely fine with having the ability to install what they want ...which is typically the first thing to go in closed ecosystems. >a single, ironically restricted set of freedoms Freedom of the sort we're talking about here is zero-sum. Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face. Would you call that "ironically restricted"? The FSF argues not unreasonably that your freedom to run private software ends at other people's computers.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    If I choose to run Windows as well as Linux, if I choose to install software I purchased, it doesn't harm RMS. In fact, it doesn't harm anyone as long as I'm aware of any potential direct personal impact, which goes for any software including open source.
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valarauca1 12y ago
The FSF refuses to compromise their principles. They refuse to negotiate. I respect them for that, morally its nice to have a fixed point to hold the line and refuse to change, it gives you a benchmark against where to judge yourself. Even if sometimes you think the old guard ate a bit to much paste.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  Exactly - every time I hear someone like ESR troll the FSF about why they should support "open source" instead and embrace proprietary software, I have to wonder what they're thinking. The sole purpose of the FSF is to promote free software. If the FSF had come out in support of this, I would have said that they're shirking on their responsibility. The FSF has been known to make compromises for the sake of pragmatism in the past, if and only if such compromises actually promote free software[1]. DRM in the browser is a very different case, though. It reminds me of the Republican party leader[0] in 2009 who said, on the topic of healthcare, 'It's over. Democrats lost. The people spoke, and they don't want healthcare. They want lower taxes. Democrats need to move on.'[2] [0] It may have been Eric Cantor, but I can't remember [1] e.g., using the LGPL instead of the GPL for glibc: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html [2] It's actually even worse than that, because political parties change their platforms over time, but since healthcare has been the crux of the Democratic party platform for half a century, it's the closest thing to a fixed principle as politics has.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Another example regarding [1] (by rms, not exactly the FSF) is actually supporting a non-copyleft/permissive license for libogg: http://lwn.net/Articles/299016/ http://lwn.net/Articles/299016/
  - bcoates 12y ago
    Calling it "healthcare" is a Democratic shibboleth, it's not a word you hear Eric Cantor use a lot.
  - anaphor 12y ago
Rusky 12y ago
Yes, it's disappointing that Mozilla is adding DRM to Firefox. No, that does not mean they hold "misguided fears about loss of browser marketshare". People have the freedom to disagree with you, FSF. Just because they do doesn't make them misguided, especially on a future prediction. How is this any different from flash/silverlight plugins we already have?
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Exactly. If Joe Sixpack or Aunt Tilly uses firefox, wants to watch Netflix, and can't because of this, they're going to switch to Chrome. They won't understand why, and won't care even if they did. I'd have thought the FSF would be more concerned about them potentially switching to Chrome in that use case...
  - pumpkinattwelve 12y ago
    Aunt Tilly won't be switching to Chrome. She will continue to use Internet Explorer 6 with the Yahoo! and Ask toolbars, but russian bride popup all while partying like it's 1999.
    - blueskin_ 12y ago
      True enough, unless a family member installed Firefox with an IE theme for them and changed the icon, which I have seen happen before. Either way, a user without a clue will switch without understanding the underlying issues.
  - chriswarbo 12y ago
    > I'd have thought the FSF would be more concerned about them potentially switching to Chrome in that use case... How is Chrome(/Chromium) worse than Firefox, if the latter starts encouraging DRM? If the FSF should compromise their principles for this, should they have also encouraged everyone to use KDE back when Qt was proprietary? How about admitting that GIF, despite being patent-encumbered, was OK to use because there it was on so many Geocities sites? Shoud we all give in and sign patent licenses, so that we can access all of those Bzip1 files? Maybe we should stop improving our Javascript engines, since clearly Flash won the battle for Web multimedia. Heck, we could increase the average level of user Freedom if we stopped all of this distracting GNU/Linux/BSD busy-work and concentrated all development effort on developing our Windows and Mac builds. Clearly no. The FSF have been playing this game for 30 years; they're in it for the long haul.
Pxtl 12y ago
Honestly, I think the w3c should've just told Netflix et al to get the heck out of the browser. Really, that's what this is all about... but those companies are already building fully native applications for every platform other than win32+Web. Telling them to go make a native application (or keep dealing with Silverlight/Flash) for that one last platform would be completely appropriate. The world of software has changed - now we have major companies building applications for multiple different platforms instead of "just windows" or "just web". The web doesn't need to do everything. It doesn't need to do this.
- Touche 12y ago
  But that's entirely the reason Netflix wants this. They don't want to create a separate application for every platform. EME offloads the cross-platform responsibility onto the browser vendor.
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    They want to have one lame web app instead of a set of nice native apps? I mean it's very efficient for start-ups and a cost-saver, but they seem to be past early stage...
    - Touche 12y ago
      Not necessary one web app, but one streaming layer, yes.
    - blueskin_ 12y ago
      Native apps have a huge set of their own problems. People don't want to have to install junk just to look at what should be a website, especially not when so many love grabbing all the personal data they can. If it had to be watched through an app, I'd bet any sum of money you'd find many/most accessing things like camera, mic, location, messaging, contacts, device ID, and other things they have zero business intruding in.
      - dTal 12y ago
sanxiyn 12y ago
Mozilla is Serving Users. A great Orwellian phrasing. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/05/14/to-serve-users.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/05/14/to-serve-users.html
frik 12y ago
Write to Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal and let him know that you oppose DRM. mailto:agal@mozilla.com
- rplnt 12y ago
  To help Google to essentially kill yet another browser.
jeswin 12y ago
If we should train our guns somewhere it should be at the W3C; the guardians of web standards. W3C shouldn't have legitimized this feature by bringing it into standards discussions. The media companies would have had to comply eventually. They had no future without distribution over the internet. Now of course, they have hope. Mozilla had no chance once Google, MS, Apple and everybody else decided to support EME. Most users don't care if they fought for open standards. They are probably just going to say that Firefox sucks. If you ask me, Mozilla could be the most important software company in the world. The stuff they are building today is fundamental to an open internet for the future. It is important that they stay healthy for what lies ahead.
- geitiegg 12y ago
  The media companies would have no issues whatsoever with continuing to use outdated, insecure and otherwise broken technologies to ensure that their content is delivered with some form of DRM. Those technologies already exist, and already ensure the media companies have a future of distribution over the web. Creating some form of standard around the use of DRM is the lesser of two evils when compared to the use of a multitude of proprietary decoders.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    Sadly, I think you're right. Silverlight is effectively dead now, but still in use for a lot of streaming video. Netflix et al will probably only ditch it when it can't even be installed on many computers any more, and will probably go for some other third party framework when they do.
  - chriswarbo 12y ago
    > Creating some form of standard around the use of DRM is the lesser of two evils when compared to the use of a multitude of proprietary decoders. I have nothing against the media and proprietary software companies getting together to make a DRM standard. It would have precisely zero impact on my life, since I already avoid all forms of DRM. I don't see what that has to do with Web standards though, since their goals are completely incompatible. EME shouldn't exist.
CmonDev 12y ago
"Open" web.
nice1 12y ago
I wonder if this would have happened with Eich there.
couchand 12y ago
Does anybody know what Brendan Eich's stance on DRM is? I can't help but wonder if this would have turned out differently had he still been in charge. Eich helped found Mozilla back when it was just contributions to Netscape, and then helped break off as a fully-fledged project. My guess is that he understood the loss here. On the other hand, Gal wrote PDF.js which replaced the proprietary PDF reader, so you'd expect him to get it, too.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  Eich strongly opposed DRM and patent-encumbered formats like H.264, but he also understood the realities of the situation[0]. The writing has been on the wall for a while - as soon as Mozilla realized that Google was going to renege on their promise to remove H.264, Firefox was bound to include it (since H.264 wasn't going anywhere). As soon as the W3C enshrined DRM in the HTML standard, it was a matter of when, not if, Firefox would be forced to, assuming the media industry adopted it (which they will). The only alternative would be for Firefox to hold out and refuse to adopt it, watching their userbase shift away to all the other browsers that did support it. [0] http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/11/brendan-eich-mozillas-cto-on-eme-and-drm/index.htm http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/11/bre...
  - magicalist 12y ago
    EME is not in the HTML standard yet, and is in fact not even out of Working Draft state yet. Meanwhile users abandoning Firefox for not supporting DRM in the browser is not at all a foregone conclusion. More likely is years of content providers forced to support other browsers, giving more leverage to those seeking other solutions.
- Cederfjard 12y ago
  I saw a relevant post in an older thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7746442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7746442
- Steve87 12y ago
  I was curious about that too. I think the result would've been the same. I hope these organizations (including the FSF) can remain focused solely on free software. Getting involved in other issues lowers the odds that a given free software community member will agree with all of those, harming the community overall.
cs702 12y ago
The key insight for me is this one: "Popularity is not an end in itself. This is especially true for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit with an ethical mission." Even though non-profit organizations like Mozilla do not seek to maximize financial gain (by definition), they often seek to maximize their relevance in the world. As a result, they ARE susceptible to corruption: most if not all are willing to "compromise" -- that is, sacrifice their mission and values -- in order to remain "important" in the eyes of society. The folks running Mozilla are sacrificing the organization's mission and values because they're afraid of losing market share. They do not want Firefox to become a niche platform.
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  It is not as simple as that, because I got the impression THE reason folks at Mozilla do not want Firefox to become a niche platform is popularity is a necessary resource to have leverage in the standard body, not popularity itself. Frankly, I think they will accept Firefox becoming less popular as long as the probability of maintaining necessary market share to have leverage increases, although I don't think such situation is likely.
  - cs702 12y ago
    Great point. The criticism is still valid, however: Mozilla IS sacrificing its mission and values... in order to remain "important" enough, in the eyes of society, to get a seat at the table. It's a slippery slope.
  - admax88q 12y ago
    What's the point in having leverage if you're not going to use it? This was their moment. They have the second largest audience of desktop users. They have their leverage, and chose not to use it.
    - jasonlotito 12y ago
      > What's the point in having leverage if you're not going to use it? You act as if the audience is tied for Firefox. It's not. As soon as a user opens up another browser instead of Firefox to get access to the content, they are no longer leverage. And when you look at the audience as those with just Firefox alone, and those with a second browser, that audience dwindles to very few indeed. You could make the argument that they then don't need to support the DRM because users can easily get around that. But then the problem there is that suddenly users are being punished. The content producers aren't suffering, just the users who are forced to switch browsers.
judah 12y ago
Between this and forcing Eich out of a job over a political issue, I've lost a lot of love for Mozilla in the last month.
camus2 12y ago
Dont worry,Mozilla already betrayed Adobe once with this whole Tamarin/ES4 fiasco,with a little luck they'll change their mind for the best this time too.
bttf 12y ago
A victory for the giants.
general_failure 12y ago
Mozilla is very much trying to be a technology company these days with profit in mind (realize that there are 2 Mozilla's - one which is a nonprofit org and another a for-profit inc). They are not like the fsf. They care about user share, market and all that. Idealists cannot afford to think that way.
budu3 12y ago
A very sad day for the Open Web. What can we as users do?
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Continue to factor DRM into your payment decisions. Given reasonable opportunities, encourage other people to do the same thing. That is, if you catch them listening, point out how DRM makes media less valuable for end users. I think being overly reasonable and keeping it simple is probably the right approach, so pointing out that a video is tied to a specific system and will likely stop working is preferable to stuff that heads in the direction of $15 purchases harming freedom.
  - acdha 12y ago
    I think this is the key avenue for progress: work to keep the perceived value of DRMed content low. People don't mind DRM on things like Netflix because the cost is so low and the model is clearly communicated in all of Netflix'x marketing. In contrast, DRM inspires significant outrage when people are told that they “own” something but are restricted from using it normally. Even people who don't normally care about technical issues know it's not right when they're told e.g. they have to pay a second time to watch a movie on their iPad after paying $50 for a Blu-Ray copy. If anything is going to change the DRM trend, it'll be increased unwillingness to pay high prices for restricted content.
- sroerick 12y ago
  Boycott Hollywood movies.
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jpadkins 12y ago
Has Mozilla really changed its policy? At a certain abstraction level, they already had a plugin in system that allowed for DRM binaries embedded in the browser. So what if the plugin system is a bit different? You could already watch DRM netflix in firefox. If they were going from no-DRM plugin policy to allowing DRM in plugins, that would be cause for uproar. But Mozilla has always allowed DRM via plugins.
- magicalist 12y ago
  > Has Mozilla really changed its policy? Yes, they are accepting a web standard that can only be implemented in a closed-source and patent-encumbered way, which should be something that both Mozilla and the W3C bitterly opposed.
- wmf 12y ago
  Arguably a DRM-specific plugin API is worse than a general-purpose plugin API (NPAPI) that was used for DRM.
  - bzbarsky 12y ago
    Even if that DRM-specific API offers sandboxing of the plugin in ways that a general-purpose API could never hope to do?
belorn 12y ago
Mozilla could and in my opinion should do much more in order to live up to their fundamental principles and stated goals. They could inform the user about each website that uses DRM without prevent the user from viewing the content. Its not even a revolutionary concept, as they are already requiring a click-to-accept with self-signed certificates. It puts the responsibility to the website if the black box called DRM causes problems, locks up, or cause some general havoc on the user. It highlights that the website is demanding to take control over the users device, and gives the user an option to say no. It is easy to speak about fundamental principles in PR announcements, but code speak louder. The only bright spot is if Mozilla don't do more for the users, add-ons and forks will try to carry the principles for them.
judk 12y ago
I await the resignation of Mozilla's CEO, who clearly has shown an inability to represent the community on this issue of human freedoms that form the cornerstone of the Mozilla Foundation.
thefreeman 12y ago
I really don't know much about e specifics of this DRM proposition. So I accept that my assumptions may be invalid. But just based on the history of DRM and e internet... does anyone really doubt that someone will be able to defeat this DRM?
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  No one is doubting DRM will be defeated. No one technical, anyway. The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violation. This seems to be widely misunderstood point. https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2 https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2
  - thefreeman 12y ago
    Thanks, that was an interesting read.
jasonlotito 12y ago
I don't see why the FSF is up in arms about this. Mozilla is essentially doing the same thing that the FSF does with the GNU C library by releasing it under the LGPL. They even spell out the case when they should adopt the lesser License[0], despite the fact that it goes against the FSF's core values and they advise not using it[1]. At the end of the day, I see this as Mozilla's LGPL. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html 0. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. 1. But we should not listen to these temptations, because we can achieve much more if we stand together.
stcredzero 12y ago
If there was some way we could verify DRM was "what it says on the tin," it could be a tremendous tool for ensuring our privacy and freedom online. When big companies DRM content, it limits our freedom, but if we could DRM our own data, it limits big company and government abuses. However, there is admittedly a big caveat here. I don't know of a workable way to know that DRM is "what it says on the tin." Big business and governments could place back doors into such mechanisms, which would put us in an even worse position than where we are now.
- wmf 12y ago
  Audited open source DRM could work if it ran on trusted computing hardware, but that's a double-edged sword. Also, the imbalance of power between companies and individuals is so great that I don't think any amount of DRM can overcome it. Companies can afford to not negotiate with individuals.
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    That's exactly the verifiability problem I'm talking about.
sutro 12y ago
Here's hoping that a viable non-Mozilla group emerges that will offer a DRM-disabled version of Firefox, one that is addon-compatible and which pulls in all non-DRM-related upstream changes. Mozilla has lost my support over this decision.
- atopal 12y ago
  It seems like you are describing an oxymoron. It's not possible to create a browser that both supports plugins, but disables DRM. Plug-ins (assuming you are referring to the NPAPI) by definition can do anything they want, and in fact are used today to implement DRM in the form of Silverlight and Flash (RTMPE). Think of this as an alternative <object> tag, that doesn't allow arbitrary plugins, but one very specific to encode and decode audio/video. Fun fact, if you have used Youtube, you have probably consumed DRMed content via Flash's RTMPE support.
  - sutro 12y ago
    I meant addons and extensions, not native code plugins. I have all plugins including flash disabled, so no, I don't consume DRM content via Youtube or any other site.
- gcp 12y ago
  offer a DRM-disabled version of Firefox, one that is plugin-compatible These two things are 100% contradictory, and the fact that they are so is the entire point of the discussion of adding EME/CDM support. You might want to try to understand the situation before you make comments as "Mozilla has lost my support over this decision."
  - sutro 12y ago
    I meant addon/extension-compatible in the Firefox parlance, not plugin compatible, and have edited my comment to clarify that. At your prompting I've now read up on the details and I'm glad that users will be able to deny the Adobe download. I incorrectly assumed that would happen automatically.
- 12y ago
edwintorok 12y ago
"Use a version of Firefox without the EME code". Well I already use a fork of Firefox called Iceweasel, so I'm curious what Debian will decide to do with Iceweasel.
- gcp 12y ago
  Too bad Iceweasel contains NPAPI which is almost exclusively used to insert much more severe DRM into it (of course that is only offered from the non-free repo).
  - edwintorok 12y ago
    I thought NPAPI is something used by all browser plugins, for example Java. Having said that I like to keep my browser free of plugins (no Java then), the less plugins, the less security vulnerabilities ;)
kumar303 12y ago
"The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser marketshare" misguided, as in, Firefox wants people to actually use its browser? I'm seriously surprised at some of these idealists failing to understand that normal people just want to watch House of Cards (or whatever) and that's pretty much it. Mozilla can't turn their back on those users.
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  Mozilla can. Mozilla decided not to. It is an important difference.
mikhailt 12y ago
I can't find the information to answer my question, so don't downvote me because it's a stupid question. I admit it is, I just want to know for curiosity. I don't understand why Adobe has to be used here? Why didn't Mozilla partner with Apple, Google, and Opera on a standard implementation code for this? After that's done, then Mozilla can try to sneak in one last question for all partners, can we do it better than this?
- wmf 12y ago
  Here's some speculation based on industry politics: Apple doesn't cooperate with anyone. Opera is irrelevant. Google, MS, and Adobe are probably willing to license their DRM plugins to Mozilla. We can imagine that some kind of three-way bidding process went on and the outcome was that Mozilla chose Adobe DRM. As others have pointed out, Adobe is kind of desperate because they don't have their own browser, so perhaps Adobe was willing to make their DRM plugin slightly less evil than Google or MS.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    If Mozilla licensed DRM from a competing browser vendor, they would effectively be crowning a de facto DRM "standard" based on combined browser market share. Mozilla's support for Adobe's "less evil" CDM means there may be more competition around DRM, though I have no theories how that might play out.
- radley 12y ago
  I'm assuming Adobe simply ported the tech from Flash video DRM (which everyone was using).
  - hsivonen 12y ago
    Well, there's a bit more tweaking to make it EME-compatible, but basically: yes.
ZenoArrow 12y ago
Why are people attacking Mozilla? Go after the real culprits in this fiasco (you know who they are), not the reluctant consenter. Kick up a fuss with users of the competing browsers. It's still possible to salvage something from this.
lazyjones 12y ago
Can we please ignore the W3C and start all over with a new "HTML" definition without all the vendor-specific and compatibility clutter, without loose parsing and redundant "featuritis" tags and attributes? Build a (much simpler) GPL browser for this new "HTML" syntax and implement compatibility plugins for legacy browsers (perhaps server-side fallback solutions to simple HTML). Put the FSF and EFF in a strong position for future development to ensure we can keep this technology isolated from the corporate interests and patent trolls. Any takers?

459 points by mikegerwitz 12y ago

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blueskin_ 12y ago

The FSF would have good points, but then they ruin them with things like "or the issues that inevitably arise when proprietary software is installed on a user's computer.". Yes, DRM is bad, but not everything has or needs to be open source to treat its users ethically, and some people do need to make a living from their software. Not everything needs to be GPL to respect people's rights to do what they want with something they bought, not everything needs to be open source just because they like it that way, and above all, people should have a right to choose to install whatever they want, and distros should have the same right to choose to tell the user about closed source software when it would be helpful to them. If the end user didn't want to hear that, they can either ignore it, or use a FSF-endorsed linux distro like Trisquel. The fact that so few people do shows to me how most people are completely fine with having the ability to install what they want. Freedom may include giving others freedom to do things you personally don't like, but the FSF tends to think a single, ironically restricted set of freedoms to match their philosophy are all that everyone needs.

jordigh 12y ago
The FSF doesn't fight for open source. They're not the "open source foundation". That's someone else. Proprietary software is obviously not a requirement to make a living off software, unless you think Mozilla had been starving until now and that's why they have to put proprietary software in Firefox.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  So every random small developer or indie game studio can get a multibillion dollar partnership with google? As it is, Mozilla's relationship with Google is looking shakier every day, as from Google's perspective it's undercutting their own business with Chrome, while from Mozilla's perspective, they promote firefox as being a browser that respects privacy, and partnering with an organisation as fundamentally anti-privacy as Google undermines that. Yes, Mozilla needs funding, but I'd rather pay a one off fee to purchase firefox if it really became necessary. Firefox could then come with no bundled search engines[1], and by default direct the user to the mozilla addons page to select which they would like to add, perhaps with a predefined list of popular choices given prominence similarly to the microsoft browser choice screen that gave prominence to Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari, then had others listed if you cared to look further. I guess that whole argument is getting into the question of whether firefox is for power users or the drooling masses who wouldn't want to configure their search engines though. [1] I'd like to see it bundled with duckduckgo included, but I know that even if it came without any, many users would want to add google themselves. I respect their choice to in that case.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - blueskin_ 12y ago
      >Chrome isn't a business, so much as another way to search the web. But instead of automated crawlers it has people who will do the searching, do the crawling. Kind of ingenious if you think about it. Google will make more (indirect) money off the average chrome user than the average firefox user, simply because they get far more metrics, analytics and data from them to make a profile for advertising. Obviously, the average firefox user is likely to have higher technical skill so possibly go to some lengths to confound tracking attempts, but that is beside the point, especially since comparable privacy addons are generally available for chrome too, with the primary exception of NoScript. (Edit: NoScript itself for chrome may not exist, but there are still comparable addons). Back when google signed the Mozilla deal, they didn't have a browser, and the stream of data they get from directing firefox users' searches through google was and still is more profitable to them than letting mozilla pick another default and denying them that data.
chriswarbo 12y ago
> and distros should have the sameright to choose to tell the user about closed osurce[sic] software when it would be helpful to them. Of course they should. That's why they have that right, and are using it. The FSF isn't stopping them; in fact, by supporting development of GNU, they're indirectly helping such distros. What point are you trying to make, that the Free Software Foundation should not complain about encroachments on Software Freedom?
belorn 12y ago
I think you do not understand how the free software movement work. Let me shine some light by rewriting your comment as if it was about a more commonly understood environmental issue. "Yes, pollution is bad, but not everything has or needs to be pollution-free to treat the environment fairly, and some products need be cheap enough to produce revenue. Not everything needs to be green to treat the environment fairly with stuff people have bought, not everything needs to be pollution-free just because they like it that way, and above all, people should have a right to choose to run whatever car they want! The fact that so few people do run pollution-free cars shows to me how most people are completely fine with driving the car they want." (btw, the FSF philosophy is the freedom to do anything except restricting other people freedom. If you want to define freedom as the right to restrict others then go ahead, but I don't).
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Nice strawman. The clear indicator of a desperate "I don't like your point but can't directly refute it".
  - teddyh 12y ago
    As opposed to your comment, which contains an eloquent refutation of belorn’s comment? Don’t simply call people trolls or strawman-slayers, use good arguments to counter bad ones. Otherwise we get bad arguments countering bad arguments, followed by meta-arguments, tone arguments, etc – don’t let it happen. See this comment for example; Is this comment not better with the second paragraph than without it?
dTal 12y ago
It's not like they said "proprietary software is evil". They say "[issues] inevitably arise when proprietary software is installed on a user's computer." That's a very mild statement that's hard to argue with. >not everything has or needs to be open source to treat its users ethically The FSF's entire raison d'etre is to disagree with that statement, and they do so eloquently. If you have a different view, that's fine, but you need to engage with their arguments a bit more deeply than just contradicting the premise. >some people do need to make a living from their software People make a living selling all sorts of things. This has no bearing on the ethics of doing so. >most people are completely fine with having the ability to install what they want ...which is typically the first thing to go in closed ecosystems. >a single, ironically restricted set of freedoms Freedom of the sort we're talking about here is zero-sum. Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face. Would you call that "ironically restricted"? The FSF argues not unreasonably that your freedom to run private software ends at other people's computers.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  If I choose to run Windows as well as Linux, if I choose to install software I purchased, it doesn't harm RMS. In fact, it doesn't harm anyone as long as I'm aware of any potential direct personal impact, which goes for any software including open source.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

valarauca1 12y ago

The FSF refuses to compromise their principles. They refuse to negotiate. I respect them for that, morally its nice to have a fixed point to hold the line and refuse to change, it gives you a benchmark against where to judge yourself. Even if sometimes you think the old guard ate a bit to much paste.

chimeracoder 12y ago
Exactly - every time I hear someone like ESR troll the FSF about why they should support "open source" instead and embrace proprietary software, I have to wonder what they're thinking. The sole purpose of the FSF is to promote free software. If the FSF had come out in support of this, I would have said that they're shirking on their responsibility. The FSF has been known to make compromises for the sake of pragmatism in the past, if and only if such compromises actually promote free software[1]. DRM in the browser is a very different case, though. It reminds me of the Republican party leader[0] in 2009 who said, on the topic of healthcare, 'It's over. Democrats lost. The people spoke, and they don't want healthcare. They want lower taxes. Democrats need to move on.'[2] [0] It may have been Eric Cantor, but I can't remember [1] e.g., using the LGPL instead of the GPL for glibc: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html [2] It's actually even worse than that, because political parties change their platforms over time, but since healthcare has been the crux of the Democratic party platform for half a century, it's the closest thing to a fixed principle as politics has.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Another example regarding [1] (by rms, not exactly the FSF) is actually supporting a non-copyleft/permissive license for libogg: http://lwn.net/Articles/299016/ http://lwn.net/Articles/299016/
- bcoates 12y ago
  Calling it "healthcare" is a Democratic shibboleth, it's not a word you hear Eric Cantor use a lot.
- anaphor 12y ago

Rusky 12y ago

Yes, it's disappointing that Mozilla is adding DRM to Firefox. No, that does not mean they hold "misguided fears about loss of browser marketshare". People have the freedom to disagree with you, FSF. Just because they do doesn't make them misguided, especially on a future prediction. How is this any different from flash/silverlight plugins we already have?

blueskin_ 12y ago
Exactly. If Joe Sixpack or Aunt Tilly uses firefox, wants to watch Netflix, and can't because of this, they're going to switch to Chrome. They won't understand why, and won't care even if they did. I'd have thought the FSF would be more concerned about them potentially switching to Chrome in that use case...
- pumpkinattwelve 12y ago
  Aunt Tilly won't be switching to Chrome. She will continue to use Internet Explorer 6 with the Yahoo! and Ask toolbars, but russian bride popup all while partying like it's 1999.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    True enough, unless a family member installed Firefox with an IE theme for them and changed the icon, which I have seen happen before. Either way, a user without a clue will switch without understanding the underlying issues.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  > I'd have thought the FSF would be more concerned about them potentially switching to Chrome in that use case... How is Chrome(/Chromium) worse than Firefox, if the latter starts encouraging DRM? If the FSF should compromise their principles for this, should they have also encouraged everyone to use KDE back when Qt was proprietary? How about admitting that GIF, despite being patent-encumbered, was OK to use because there it was on so many Geocities sites? Shoud we all give in and sign patent licenses, so that we can access all of those Bzip1 files? Maybe we should stop improving our Javascript engines, since clearly Flash won the battle for Web multimedia. Heck, we could increase the average level of user Freedom if we stopped all of this distracting GNU/Linux/BSD busy-work and concentrated all development effort on developing our Windows and Mac builds. Clearly no. The FSF have been playing this game for 30 years; they're in it for the long haul.

Pxtl 12y ago

Honestly, I think the w3c should've just told Netflix et al to get the heck out of the browser. Really, that's what this is all about... but those companies are already building fully native applications for every platform other than win32+Web. Telling them to go make a native application (or keep dealing with Silverlight/Flash) for that one last platform would be completely appropriate. The world of software has changed - now we have major companies building applications for multiple different platforms instead of "just windows" or "just web". The web doesn't need to do everything. It doesn't need to do this.

Touche 12y ago
But that's entirely the reason Netflix wants this. They don't want to create a separate application for every platform. EME offloads the cross-platform responsibility onto the browser vendor.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  They want to have one lame web app instead of a set of nice native apps? I mean it's very efficient for start-ups and a cost-saver, but they seem to be past early stage...
  - Touche 12y ago
    Not necessary one web app, but one streaming layer, yes.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    Native apps have a huge set of their own problems. People don't want to have to install junk just to look at what should be a website, especially not when so many love grabbing all the personal data they can. If it had to be watched through an app, I'd bet any sum of money you'd find many/most accessing things like camera, mic, location, messaging, contacts, device ID, and other things they have zero business intruding in.
    - dTal 12y ago

sanxiyn 12y ago

Mozilla is Serving Users. A great Orwellian phrasing. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/05/14/to-serve-users.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/05/14/to-serve-users.html

frik 12y ago

Write to Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal and let him know that you oppose DRM. mailto:agal@mozilla.com

rplnt 12y ago
To help Google to essentially kill yet another browser.

jeswin 12y ago

If we should train our guns somewhere it should be at the W3C; the guardians of web standards. W3C shouldn't have legitimized this feature by bringing it into standards discussions. The media companies would have had to comply eventually. They had no future without distribution over the internet. Now of course, they have hope. Mozilla had no chance once Google, MS, Apple and everybody else decided to support EME. Most users don't care if they fought for open standards. They are probably just going to say that Firefox sucks. If you ask me, Mozilla could be the most important software company in the world. The stuff they are building today is fundamental to an open internet for the future. It is important that they stay healthy for what lies ahead.

geitiegg 12y ago
The media companies would have no issues whatsoever with continuing to use outdated, insecure and otherwise broken technologies to ensure that their content is delivered with some form of DRM. Those technologies already exist, and already ensure the media companies have a future of distribution over the web. Creating some form of standard around the use of DRM is the lesser of two evils when compared to the use of a multitude of proprietary decoders.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Sadly, I think you're right. Silverlight is effectively dead now, but still in use for a lot of streaming video. Netflix et al will probably only ditch it when it can't even be installed on many computers any more, and will probably go for some other third party framework when they do.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  > Creating some form of standard around the use of DRM is the lesser of two evils when compared to the use of a multitude of proprietary decoders. I have nothing against the media and proprietary software companies getting together to make a DRM standard. It would have precisely zero impact on my life, since I already avoid all forms of DRM. I don't see what that has to do with Web standards though, since their goals are completely incompatible. EME shouldn't exist.

CmonDev 12y ago

"Open" web.

nice1 12y ago

I wonder if this would have happened with Eich there.

couchand 12y ago

Does anybody know what Brendan Eich's stance on DRM is? I can't help but wonder if this would have turned out differently had he still been in charge. Eich helped found Mozilla back when it was just contributions to Netscape, and then helped break off as a fully-fledged project. My guess is that he understood the loss here. On the other hand, Gal wrote PDF.js which replaced the proprietary PDF reader, so you'd expect him to get it, too.

chimeracoder 12y ago
Eich strongly opposed DRM and patent-encumbered formats like H.264, but he also understood the realities of the situation[0]. The writing has been on the wall for a while - as soon as Mozilla realized that Google was going to renege on their promise to remove H.264, Firefox was bound to include it (since H.264 wasn't going anywhere). As soon as the W3C enshrined DRM in the HTML standard, it was a matter of when, not if, Firefox would be forced to, assuming the media industry adopted it (which they will). The only alternative would be for Firefox to hold out and refuse to adopt it, watching their userbase shift away to all the other browsers that did support it. [0] http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/11/brendan-eich-mozillas-cto-on-eme-and-drm/index.htm http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/11/bre...
- magicalist 12y ago
  EME is not in the HTML standard yet, and is in fact not even out of Working Draft state yet. Meanwhile users abandoning Firefox for not supporting DRM in the browser is not at all a foregone conclusion. More likely is years of content providers forced to support other browsers, giving more leverage to those seeking other solutions.
Cederfjard 12y ago
I saw a relevant post in an older thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7746442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7746442
Steve87 12y ago
I was curious about that too. I think the result would've been the same. I hope these organizations (including the FSF) can remain focused solely on free software. Getting involved in other issues lowers the odds that a given free software community member will agree with all of those, harming the community overall.

cs702 12y ago

The key insight for me is this one: "Popularity is not an end in itself. This is especially true for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit with an ethical mission." Even though non-profit organizations like Mozilla do not seek to maximize financial gain (by definition), they often seek to maximize their relevance in the world. As a result, they ARE susceptible to corruption: most if not all are willing to "compromise" -- that is, sacrifice their mission and values -- in order to remain "important" in the eyes of society. The folks running Mozilla are sacrificing the organization's mission and values because they're afraid of losing market share. They do not want Firefox to become a niche platform.

sanxiyn 12y ago
It is not as simple as that, because I got the impression THE reason folks at Mozilla do not want Firefox to become a niche platform is popularity is a necessary resource to have leverage in the standard body, not popularity itself. Frankly, I think they will accept Firefox becoming less popular as long as the probability of maintaining necessary market share to have leverage increases, although I don't think such situation is likely.
- cs702 12y ago
  Great point. The criticism is still valid, however: Mozilla IS sacrificing its mission and values... in order to remain "important" enough, in the eyes of society, to get a seat at the table. It's a slippery slope.
- admax88q 12y ago
  What's the point in having leverage if you're not going to use it? This was their moment. They have the second largest audience of desktop users. They have their leverage, and chose not to use it.
  - jasonlotito 12y ago
    > What's the point in having leverage if you're not going to use it? You act as if the audience is tied for Firefox. It's not. As soon as a user opens up another browser instead of Firefox to get access to the content, they are no longer leverage. And when you look at the audience as those with just Firefox alone, and those with a second browser, that audience dwindles to very few indeed. You could make the argument that they then don't need to support the DRM because users can easily get around that. But then the problem there is that suddenly users are being punished. The content producers aren't suffering, just the users who are forced to switch browsers.

judah 12y ago

Between this and forcing Eich out of a job over a political issue, I've lost a lot of love for Mozilla in the last month.

camus2 12y ago

Dont worry,Mozilla already betrayed Adobe once with this whole Tamarin/ES4 fiasco,with a little luck they'll change their mind for the best this time too.

bttf 12y ago

A victory for the giants.

general_failure 12y ago

Mozilla is very much trying to be a technology company these days with profit in mind (realize that there are 2 Mozilla's - one which is a nonprofit org and another a for-profit inc). They are not like the fsf. They care about user share, market and all that. Idealists cannot afford to think that way.

budu3 12y ago

A very sad day for the Open Web. What can we as users do?

maxerickson 12y ago
Continue to factor DRM into your payment decisions. Given reasonable opportunities, encourage other people to do the same thing. That is, if you catch them listening, point out how DRM makes media less valuable for end users. I think being overly reasonable and keeping it simple is probably the right approach, so pointing out that a video is tied to a specific system and will likely stop working is preferable to stuff that heads in the direction of $15 purchases harming freedom.
- acdha 12y ago
  I think this is the key avenue for progress: work to keep the perceived value of DRMed content low. People don't mind DRM on things like Netflix because the cost is so low and the model is clearly communicated in all of Netflix'x marketing. In contrast, DRM inspires significant outrage when people are told that they “own” something but are restricted from using it normally. Even people who don't normally care about technical issues know it's not right when they're told e.g. they have to pay a second time to watch a movie on their iPad after paying $50 for a Blu-Ray copy. If anything is going to change the DRM trend, it'll be increased unwillingness to pay high prices for restricted content.
sroerick 12y ago
Boycott Hollywood movies.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jpadkins 12y ago

Has Mozilla really changed its policy? At a certain abstraction level, they already had a plugin in system that allowed for DRM binaries embedded in the browser. So what if the plugin system is a bit different? You could already watch DRM netflix in firefox. If they were going from no-DRM plugin policy to allowing DRM in plugins, that would be cause for uproar. But Mozilla has always allowed DRM via plugins.

magicalist 12y ago
> Has Mozilla really changed its policy? Yes, they are accepting a web standard that can only be implemented in a closed-source and patent-encumbered way, which should be something that both Mozilla and the W3C bitterly opposed.
wmf 12y ago
Arguably a DRM-specific plugin API is worse than a general-purpose plugin API (NPAPI) that was used for DRM.
- bzbarsky 12y ago
  Even if that DRM-specific API offers sandboxing of the plugin in ways that a general-purpose API could never hope to do?

belorn 12y ago

Mozilla could and in my opinion should do much more in order to live up to their fundamental principles and stated goals. They could inform the user about each website that uses DRM without prevent the user from viewing the content. Its not even a revolutionary concept, as they are already requiring a click-to-accept with self-signed certificates. It puts the responsibility to the website if the black box called DRM causes problems, locks up, or cause some general havoc on the user. It highlights that the website is demanding to take control over the users device, and gives the user an option to say no. It is easy to speak about fundamental principles in PR announcements, but code speak louder. The only bright spot is if Mozilla don't do more for the users, add-ons and forks will try to carry the principles for them.

judk 12y ago

I await the resignation of Mozilla's CEO, who clearly has shown an inability to represent the community on this issue of human freedoms that form the cornerstone of the Mozilla Foundation.

thefreeman 12y ago

I really don't know much about e specifics of this DRM proposition. So I accept that my assumptions may be invalid. But just based on the history of DRM and e internet... does anyone really doubt that someone will be able to defeat this DRM?

sanxiyn 12y ago
No one is doubting DRM will be defeated. No one technical, anyway. The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violation. This seems to be widely misunderstood point. https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2 https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2
- thefreeman 12y ago
  Thanks, that was an interesting read.

jasonlotito 12y ago

I don't see why the FSF is up in arms about this. Mozilla is essentially doing the same thing that the FSF does with the GNU C library by releasing it under the LGPL. They even spell out the case when they should adopt the lesser License[0], despite the fact that it goes against the FSF's core values and they advise not using it[1]. At the end of the day, I see this as Mozilla's LGPL. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html 0. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. 1. But we should not listen to these temptations, because we can achieve much more if we stand together.

stcredzero 12y ago

If there was some way we could verify DRM was "what it says on the tin," it could be a tremendous tool for ensuring our privacy and freedom online. When big companies DRM content, it limits our freedom, but if we could DRM our own data, it limits big company and government abuses. However, there is admittedly a big caveat here. I don't know of a workable way to know that DRM is "what it says on the tin." Big business and governments could place back doors into such mechanisms, which would put us in an even worse position than where we are now.

wmf 12y ago
Audited open source DRM could work if it ran on trusted computing hardware, but that's a double-edged sword. Also, the imbalance of power between companies and individuals is so great that I don't think any amount of DRM can overcome it. Companies can afford to not negotiate with individuals.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  That's exactly the verifiability problem I'm talking about.

sutro 12y ago

Here's hoping that a viable non-Mozilla group emerges that will offer a DRM-disabled version of Firefox, one that is addon-compatible and which pulls in all non-DRM-related upstream changes. Mozilla has lost my support over this decision.

atopal 12y ago
It seems like you are describing an oxymoron. It's not possible to create a browser that both supports plugins, but disables DRM. Plug-ins (assuming you are referring to the NPAPI) by definition can do anything they want, and in fact are used today to implement DRM in the form of Silverlight and Flash (RTMPE). Think of this as an alternative <object> tag, that doesn't allow arbitrary plugins, but one very specific to encode and decode audio/video. Fun fact, if you have used Youtube, you have probably consumed DRMed content via Flash's RTMPE support.
- sutro 12y ago
  I meant addons and extensions, not native code plugins. I have all plugins including flash disabled, so no, I don't consume DRM content via Youtube or any other site.
gcp 12y ago
offer a DRM-disabled version of Firefox, one that is plugin-compatible These two things are 100% contradictory, and the fact that they are so is the entire point of the discussion of adding EME/CDM support. You might want to try to understand the situation before you make comments as "Mozilla has lost my support over this decision."
- sutro 12y ago
  I meant addon/extension-compatible in the Firefox parlance, not plugin compatible, and have edited my comment to clarify that. At your prompting I've now read up on the details and I'm glad that users will be able to deny the Adobe download. I incorrectly assumed that would happen automatically.
12y ago

edwintorok 12y ago

"Use a version of Firefox without the EME code". Well I already use a fork of Firefox called Iceweasel, so I'm curious what Debian will decide to do with Iceweasel.

gcp 12y ago
Too bad Iceweasel contains NPAPI which is almost exclusively used to insert much more severe DRM into it (of course that is only offered from the non-free repo).
- edwintorok 12y ago
  I thought NPAPI is something used by all browser plugins, for example Java. Having said that I like to keep my browser free of plugins (no Java then), the less plugins, the less security vulnerabilities ;)

kumar303 12y ago

"The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser marketshare" misguided, as in, Firefox wants people to actually use its browser? I'm seriously surprised at some of these idealists failing to understand that normal people just want to watch House of Cards (or whatever) and that's pretty much it. Mozilla can't turn their back on those users.

sanxiyn 12y ago
Mozilla can. Mozilla decided not to. It is an important difference.

mikhailt 12y ago

I can't find the information to answer my question, so don't downvote me because it's a stupid question. I admit it is, I just want to know for curiosity. I don't understand why Adobe has to be used here? Why didn't Mozilla partner with Apple, Google, and Opera on a standard implementation code for this? After that's done, then Mozilla can try to sneak in one last question for all partners, can we do it better than this?

wmf 12y ago
Here's some speculation based on industry politics: Apple doesn't cooperate with anyone. Opera is irrelevant. Google, MS, and Adobe are probably willing to license their DRM plugins to Mozilla. We can imagine that some kind of three-way bidding process went on and the outcome was that Mozilla chose Adobe DRM. As others have pointed out, Adobe is kind of desperate because they don't have their own browser, so perhaps Adobe was willing to make their DRM plugin slightly less evil than Google or MS.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  If Mozilla licensed DRM from a competing browser vendor, they would effectively be crowning a de facto DRM "standard" based on combined browser market share. Mozilla's support for Adobe's "less evil" CDM means there may be more competition around DRM, though I have no theories how that might play out.
radley 12y ago
I'm assuming Adobe simply ported the tech from Flash video DRM (which everyone was using).
- hsivonen 12y ago
  Well, there's a bit more tweaking to make it EME-compatible, but basically: yes.

ZenoArrow 12y ago

Why are people attacking Mozilla? Go after the real culprits in this fiasco (you know who they are), not the reluctant consenter. Kick up a fuss with users of the competing browsers. It's still possible to salvage something from this.

lazyjones 12y ago

Can we please ignore the W3C and start all over with a new "HTML" definition without all the vendor-specific and compatibility clutter, without loose parsing and redundant "featuritis" tags and attributes? Build a (much simpler) GPL browser for this new "HTML" syntax and implement compatibility plugins for legacy browsers (perhaps server-side fallback solutions to simple HTML). Put the FSF and EFF in a strong position for future development to ensure we can keep this technology isolated from the corporate interests and patent trolls. Any takers?