Lorraine Lee on Nostr: Dave Lane 🇳🇿 DRM or general purpose computing really is a "pick one" ...

Dave Lane 🇳🇿 (npub19h0…k428) DRM or general purpose computing really is a "pick one" proposition, for deeply theoretical reasons that are not negotiable. In hindsight, it would have been better if the entertainment industry never looked to PCs as a distribution platform, and if the computing community never accommodated audiovisual media, and the digitization of entertainment instead went to "set top box" type devices, some portable, perhaps which it's a felony to take a screwdriver to or otherwise be curious about, but of course don't get advertised as "computers."

In that timeline, I suppose computers would be more archaic and offer less in the way of graphical interfaces. The talent for building graphical interfaces might be rare, or might simply not be served by free software principles. The people most motivated by such principles are people who struggle with the interface between hardware and software, those of us who routed general purpose computing around the tamper-resistance antifeatures of the 8-bit era cartridges and the like, for example. I also remember feeling very empowered by first learning compiler languages and being intoxicated by the ability to create "native" executables instead of interpreted code which necessarily pulls in "dependencies." And of course from there programmers started to worry whether the libraries they were linking in were "royalty free" and...