why I hate your freedom
Happy New Thing.
So anyway, Adam Leventhal found out AAPL hamstrung DTrace w.r.t. certain apps on Leopard (iTunes at least). Cue inevitable Slashdottian outrage.
When source code gets released under a license everyone (so long as they follow those terms) gets to port, extend, or shout about how your license isn’t free at all really. They can even choose to ignore you, or to provide really shitty implementations. None of the above makes them ‘evil’.
Some of OS X is open source, some is proprietary, and some is riddled with DRM. iTunes is in the last category. It’s Apples main cash cow; if it was reverse engineered they’d lose a competitive advantage, scare their movie/music business partners away, and the terrorists would win.
OSX ships with a full toolchain and part of that is Instruments - a GarageBand-like frontend to DTrace. It’ll probably be the first contact with DTrace a lot of coders get. I’ve only tinkered with it, but right away you can see why it’d make DRM fans twitchy. Running iPhoto under Instruments let me see down into the Cocoa API calls. I now know how atomic preference changes are implemented at the system call level. Basically, it’s fucking great.
It was really nice of Apple to give it out for free, just like it was nice of Sun to give us DTrace, ZFS and NFS. Telling either company how they should release any of those products makes you a bit of a deRaadt in my book.
a different DRM
I finally snuck Rails under the radar at work (in an unholy union with mod_perl – it’s been interesting) and needed to get up to date quickly. Thought I’d go for the AWDWROR Beta Book -
passed on the Book + PDF combo for a few reasons
- I fancied saving a few trees
- it was a lot cheaper (no shipping)
- the book isn’t ready yet, so in the short term it made no odds
The beta book idea is fantastic.
The PDF cost about 12 quid at the end of August (buy stuff from the States whereever possible – the dollar is doing really badly against the pound at the moment).
Since then I’ve had free updates – sometimes sections are rewritten, sometimes whole chapters.
The sections that differ from the first edition are highlighted, so it’s easy to find new material.
PDF books, as you probably know, are great. You click the table of contents or index to get to relevant sections. It’s searchable. You can cut n paste it. When you’re working through the code examples, you click a URL and your browser grabs the CSS or ruby code.
More importantly, they haven’t gone out of their way to piss me off.
DRM done wrong
I’ve had an Audible account since they gave out free ipod shuffles to subscribers last year. They have a good range of books, and you can get 40-odd hours of Bill Bryson or Marco Polo for about 12 quid. Their customer service is the best I’ve ever encountered.
The only thing wrong with them is the file format. I need to give a username and password to burn it to CDs. If I want to listen to it on my phones MP3 player, I have to burn it to CD, then rip it back to MP3.
Bear in mind I can get these books on P2P for nothing. I actually pay them to fuck me about like this.
DRM done right
The Beta Book copy protection system works like this.
You’re allowed as many copies as you feel you need to keep it safe (though if it get destroyed, you just ask for another). It’ll ‘play’ on your phone/ebook reader/laptop/printer/speech synthesizer.
At the bottom of each page, it says “this book belongs to XXX’.
Nothing stops you sharing it, you’ll just look like a bit of a prick (I suspect Dave and co. wouldn’t be too keen to give you any more updates).
I know some hipp people say ‘information wants to be free’. But it’s the information in a book that’s valuable, not the paper it’s printed on.
I have no problem paying for valuable things, but most DRMed products expect you to pay extra for an intentionally broken product.
It’s nice just for once (correct me if you can, but I know of no other examples) to see someone charge less for something that cost less to make.