[ Thanks to Paul
Eggert for this link. ]
“Coming down hard and fast on any organization that
threatens technological liberty is an ancient geek pastime of
unusual ferocity. Last December the U.K.-based online news
service The Register broke the story that a consortium of
companies–Intel, IBM, Toshiba and Matsushita–were plotting to
include a scheme known as content protection for recordable media
(CPRM) in the next-generation standard for computer hard
disks.”
“Free-software guru Richard Stallman predicted in another
Register story that CPRM would kill off open-source software by
fragmenting it into two camps, one supporting the copy-protection
regime and one not. Andre Hedrick, who represents the Linux (or
GNU-Linux, as Stallman insists, because Linux incorporates aspects
of GNU, a free software clone of UNIX) community on the technical
committee considering the idea, proposed changes to the
implementation that would make turning on the copy-protection
system optional for users.”