Re: [Fsfe-uk] Trying to pull a fast one in the Office

[Martyn Ranyard]

Quoting Robert J Munro <address@hidden>:
> "Information Rights Management" (in the sense above) has nothing to do 
> with free speech or philosophy. It's just a silly name for a combination 
> of features added to Microsoft offfice programs that provide encryption, 
> DRM, and the ability to see and clean out all the junk that office 
> documents tend to accumulate.

Yup, couldn't agree more.  It's features for the sake of features.

> I'm sure the DRM, at the very least, will be cracked soon enough. 

Sure it will, but not in america (DMCA), and I've lost track of where the
european copyright stuff is at present.  The problem is that companies who are
currently running 98SE/NT4WS (the most sensible small businesses stick to these
like glue, because they are stable and solid), will be forced away from them if
the corporates take up office 2k3.  New Software, New Hardware, More training
etc.  UNLESS sun or someone else funds the fast reverse engineering job outside
of the US.  It could be a wonderful way of introducing more non-free shops to
the advantages of free software - send them an office 2003 document with all
these fancy bits turned on and if they phone to say "we can't read it", tell
them all about OpenOffice and (hopefully by that point) it's ability to support
the format, without paying hundreds of pounds per machine.  An odd way to
approach advocacy I know, but if it works...

> The ability to clean out the junk is a hack. They really should stop it 
> saving the junk in the first place.

Yeah, and I could go off on an anti-ms tangent, but we all know them, it's too 
easy.

> It occurs to me that the facility to display a document, but not allow 
> copy and paste without a password cannot be achieved except by keeping 
> the source code secret. This would seem to clash with Microsoft's 
> "Shared Source" program.

Well, it is possible - just because GPG is opensource doesn't mean that someone
can defeat its encryption.  How likely MS are to come up with a good encrption
system is anyones guess - I would imagine they'll just buy one of Symantec or
someone.

> Robert Munro

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