4/10/2006 3:57:00 PM, by Anders Bylund

A RealNetworks vice president voiced a few inflammatory opinions during LinuxWorld Boston last Tuesday. The RealNetworks rep in question, Jeff Ayars, said that Linux as a consumer platform would be dead unless DRM capabilities are built into the OS itself.

"The consequences of Linux not supporting DRM would be that fixed-purpose consumer electronics and Windows PCs would be the sole entertainment platforms available," Ayers said. "Linux would be further relegated to use in servers and business computers, since it would not be providing the multimedia technologies demanded by consumers."

Ayers has a few supporters in this issue from the Linux camp, as Novell, Linspire, and Red Hat spokespeople reportedly said they would be happy to add DRM to their distributions, but with some caveats. Novell, for example, is "currently in discussions with vendors who control proprietary formats" with the goal of supporting these formats in SuSE Linux. One can only surmise exactly which formats that would be, but recent rumblings from Redmond make it likely that Microsoft DRM solutions such as PlaysForSure could be among them. Holding your breath for Apple's FairPlay to be licensed to third parties like Novell could be bad for your health, though. Those are the two DRMs Linspire hope to use if given the chance.

It certainly makes commercial sense for Linux vendors to support technologies like FairPlay—just look at the huge installed user base for that particular DRM. But FairPlay didn't reach market dominance by accident to begin with. Georg Greve of the European arm of the FSF explains this rather succinctly:

"The Sony rootkit case made it quite clear why DRM is not accepted by consumers and why there is no successful business case for DRM. Apple iTunes allows people to burn their tracks on regular CDs, which can then be re-encoded and file-shared easily—so is better described as 'digital inconvenience management' only. eMusic.com offers clean audio tracks without any restrictions. No DRM platform comes close to either of these in popularity. So fortunately, it is up to the consumer to decide what the consumer market wants. And its answer is clear: It does not want DRM! The sooner we bury the foolish notion of putting each and every use of a computer under control of the media industry, the sooner we can start looking for real alternatives."

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