Perpetual quest for GNU smartphone

[Geoffrey Mendelson]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il> wrote:

> Take a look at Palm. 10 years it was the most popular PDA platform, and
> was continuously becoming even more so. So thousands of applications were
> developed for it - many free and many not. Palm did not have any DRM of
> the type Apple forced on us, but application developers managed. Heck,
> an even more popular platform, called MS Windows (I'm sure you've heard
> about it :-)), had no DRM and still commercial software was sold for
> it all the time.

That was before Apple proved that you could build a portable music
player based on DRM and couple it with an online store that sold
DRM'ed songs, tv programs, etc and make a fortune.

All of the iTunes media is tagged with the userid of the person who
buys it, and except for their special DRM free offerings (which are
few and relatively low quality) all of the pay for it media is DRM
protected.

The Palm never had any audio or video media. It did have programs and
ebooks. Some of the ebooks were available only in special formats
which could only be read on the Palm and only if you bought a specific
program. Even the free eBook reader had half of its features stop
working after a month if you did not buy a license key.

What made the Zune flop, is not that it used DRM, but that it applied
DRM to files you already owned that did not have any.

Unfortunately the current US copyright law was written by Disney and
they make the RIAA look like nice guys.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem, Israel