[Gllug] Finally some mainstream coverage of EUCD

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 09:33, Richard Jones wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 09:18:38AM +0000, Chris Bell wrote:
> >    Which is probably one of the reasons why there are groups of countries in
> > the far-east about to go their own ways, and probably based on Open Source.
> 
> There's a very compelling economic argument for them to go this way,
> particularly if the US & Europe go down the route of mandating closed
> hardware.
> 
> Having open hardware and "open" software (I include Windows in this,
> for now) has encouraged a huge explosion of technological innovation,
> coming up from the tinkerers and small-time inventors. If the US
> destroys this mass base of innovation, then any other country that
> wasn't foolish enough to do the same will outcompete them.

This seems quite likely to happen at the moment. As the copyright
cartels are starting to try and seriously do something about software
piracy in the far east, there appears to be a serious drive from
governments over ther to deal with the problem by telling western
software companies to pick up their chips and go home.

If the west hobbles itself with DRM at the behest of a few shortsighted
thugs with influence, countries like Taiwan and China will laugh. Most
of the hardware is already made over there, and if they adopted a truly
open information infrastructure on a transnational scale, they'd be
poised to completely decimate western economies. Programmer time is much
cheaper over there, and that's the limiting factor these days. It would
be most ironic if America hung itself on the noose of the DMCA and it's
successors. Sadly, it's likely our lot are too small minded to prevent
us from following them into the pit...

Mike.


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