Mastodawn

https://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

@chx was that the one from the mid-2000s that started with "Yar"? I helped set that up -- I connected @pluralistic to the person organizing talks for Microsoft Research 😎

EDIT: and here's the link! I had misremembered, it actually starts

"Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!"

The Witch of Crow Briar

@jdp23 @chx @pluralistic Speaking as someone that started working at Microsoft back in 2003, I am ASTOUNDED this talk happened. It never would today (not would me working there)

@crowbriarhexe Microsoft Research had a lot of autonomy at the time and prided themselves on allowing critical viewpoints. Also it was still an open question about what to do about consumer DRM -- they released the first version of Zune without DRM. And I had written a BillG Thinkweek paper on "Why Microsoft should abandon DRM" and he had forwarded it on with "not sure I agree but we should think about this" (or something like that).

@chx @pluralistic

chx Jul 15, 2023

@jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @pluralistic we won the battle on MP3s sold with DRM. And then lost the war completely: over 80% of music revenue in the US is from streaming which "of course" is DRM'd. Let's not even mention Netflix and co. We similarly won the kernel battle (Android, servers all run Linux) and lost the end user free software war so totally its not even fought any more.

Dima Pasechnik 🇺🇦 🇳🇱Jul 15, 2023

@chx @jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @pluralistic
end user free software known as ChromeOS is happily running on at least 100,000,000 units atm. Does it count as a lost battle?

LaPingvino 🟙

Jul 15, 2023

@chx @jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @pluralistic I don't think these wars are won by battles. My POV is that a new generation is introduced by irrelevance of the previous one. Laws can only delay things happening. At some point what everyone does is basically how everyone thinks it should be and has always been, even if it's something new. The real battle is about what we do, not about how the laws say things should be. That says, laws very much do decide how things can and will form, we need them to keep companies in check. Using them to protect companies is complete nonsense.

Neil Mackenzie Jul 15, 2023

@chx @jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @pluralistic

When you write “we won the battle on MP3s sold with DRM” does “we” include musicians?

chx Jul 15, 2023

@mknz @jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @pluralistic MP3 stores by and large dropped DRM for eg iTunes in 2009. That's all I meant.

The Witch of Crow Briar Jul 17, 2023

@chx yeah and I agree with your characterization of winning the battle but losing the war, unfortunately, but that was def not obvious at the time. DRM felt like *the* fight especially after the wild west of unrestricted file sharing.

David Rolfe Jul 15, 2023

@mknz yes. Bandcamp exists. Apple and Amazon sell music to own with no drm or lock-in. Music piracy dwindled. Where we (musicians and listeners) lost the war is on streaming, monopolization and enshittification. I’ll never see a penny from Spotify, but I’ve made a few dollars on Bandcamp.

David Rolfe Jul 15, 2023

@mknz almost no one is paying their rent with music. There are like 9 to 30 thousand professional musicians in the USA (measures vary) that’s a tiny tiny minority.

Ohad Lutzky Jul 16, 2023

@chx @jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @pluralistic The primary issue of DRM had, for most, been locking of music behind "thou shalt buy song-by-song (preferably physical media)" paywalls. I'd argue that MP3 sharing made that go away. "Listen to anything you want with ads or pay a small amount to make them go away" is an RIAA defeat.
The primary issue of closed software had, similarly, been closed *formats*, especially for things like word processors or websites; this has also largely been resolved.

Larry Rubinow Jul 15, 2023

@chx @jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @pluralistic Capitalism never sleeps. :(

prozacchiwawa Jul 15, 2023

@jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic always wondered about the inside baseball of 'playsforsure' in that era.

@jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic

Speaking as someone who left MSR in 2000 (not all that long after we got the memo from legal that roughly went: Giving aid and comfort to open-source projects = TREASON), I'm likewise astounded.

Also surprised your DRM memo didn't end up being a career-limiting move.

@crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic

@wrog Yeah the Craig Mundie "open source is cancer" perspective certainly set the tone for corporate policy. And with consumer DRM, at the end of the day Microsoft wound up siding with Hollywood et al and against their individual users. Oh well.

Interestingly the ThinkWeek paper wasn't a CLM -- in fact Gates continued to support the other stuff I was working on (as did Ballmer).

Dima Pasechnik 🇺🇦 🇳🇱Jul 15, 2023

@wrog @jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic
Simon Peyton Jones, at that time the lead developer of the open source Haskell compiler ghc, worked at MSR Cambridge from 1998 till 2021, and he certainly didn't do his ghc work in spare time only, also his co-workers contributed to ghc.

Thus I wonder how universal "treason" has been applied.

@dimpase @wrog @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic

Yeah, there were always exceptions. And, open source is an area where Microsoft’s position has changed over the years - they’re now fairly supportive

@jdp23 @dimpase @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic

(1) I'd think hiring SPJ would have been *impossible* without *some* kind of arrangement re GHC.

Easy, too: Haskell is an infinitesimally small "market" (vs. Office, Windows, or even Visual Studio); MSFT wouldn't give 2 shits (... hard enough getting them to care about C/C++ & dev tools; those only sold ~20,000 copies -- in the noise -- kept losing political fights).

(2) Memo was mainly about Linux and Apache, direct server/OS competition that MSFT was *losing*. My supervisors assured me memo didn't quite mean what it appeared, but our group *had* been throwing stuff over the wall to the GNU emacs folks for some time, and it was fairly clear that would be getting harder.

1/3

@jdp23 @dimpase @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic

(3) I'm sure MSR *was* allowed to get away with shit that other parts of the company couldn't, but corporate was NOT shy about cracking down when they felt the need.

Last group I worked for had built a research Java compiler, a framework for testing out optimizations -- choice of language didn't matter *that* much, but in 1996 it was an obvious one.

By 2000 they'd produced a solid stream of publications and patents from it -- i.e., highly successful from a research point of view.

2/3

@jdp23 @dimpase @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic

Problem was by that point Sun was suing MSFT (over J++ -- completely unrelated) and there was always the worry that it'd be game over for the research group once a sufficiently high level of management caught wind of its existence.

Sure enough, about six months after I left, the hammer came down, manager was not-quite-fired, but also not invited to join the new C# research group (that would be having to drop everything and spend the next 6 months rewriting all of their Java code, just because).

Also maybe Cambridge MSR being farther away is under less scrutiny than Redmond MSR.

And, to be fair, this was 20+ years ago.

3/3

The Witch of Crow Briar Jul 17, 2023

@wrog @jdp23 @dimpase @chx @pluralistic back in 2000 my day job was mostly Java, but on Windows and integrated with a Win32 application, and I was so impressed with Visual J++, it was easily the best Java IDE at the time, even if it was clearly the "embrace, extend" phases of the strategy. Super interesting that such a compiler group and project existed back then.