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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 he

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.

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.