Valve - Credit: valvesoftware.com

Video game maker Valve decries DRM as redundant and devaluing.

Valve is a wonderfully open company—in many cases, direct questions sent to the publisher will be answered by a member of the creative team within hours. One gamer recently e-mailed Valve and asked why he saw EA’s logo on a commercial for Left 4 Dead: he bought the game via Steam but didn’t want to support EA after the Spore DRM debacle. He got a reply from a managing director at the company, Gabe Newell, that was to the point: EA only handles distribution for the physical product, and Valve thinks most DRM is “just dumb.”

Newell doesn’t have kind words for the use of digital rights managements. “As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value… not by decreasing the value of a product.”

• Wired

iTunes error. Source: http://arstechnica.com/

Ars Technica reports that Apple’s new line of MacBooks contains a new Mini DisplayPort. This port also contains a DRM scheme that breaks compatibility with unapproved display devices when select videos from the iTunes Store are played.

When my friend John, a high school teacher, attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom’s projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see above. John’s using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room’s Promethean system. Strangely, only some iTunes Store movies appear to be HDCP-aware, as other purchased media like Stargate: Continuum and Heroes season 2 play through the projector just fine. Attempts to play Hellboy 2 or other HDCPed films through the projector via QuickTime also get denied. Other movies that don’t work include newer films like Iron Man, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Love Guru, but older films like Shawshank Redemption are restricted as well.

This was first reported on November 18th.  I apologize for this post being so late.

• Ars Technica
• Electronic Frontier Foundation

Creative Commons - Credit: creativecommons.org

CC has published a questionare on what “NonCommercial” means.  This has been the subject of much debate.

As previously announced, we’re running a questionnaire on understanding “NonCommercial” use. The questionnaire runs through December 7. It takes 15-25 minutes to complete.

Click here to start the questionnaire.

Check out why non-commercial may not be the best idea and fill out the survey.

• Creative Commons

Songbird 1.0 - Credit: Songnest.com

Songbird 1.0 has been released.  Songbird is an extensible music player licensed under the GPLv2.

We set out to build an open, customizable music player. Today, we’re launching with dozens of integrated services, hundreds of add-ons, and a growing developer community. We’ll be the first to admit that there’s plenty left to do. And, while we’re not ready for everyone, 160k users a month are expressing their vote for an alternative music player.

If you think like us, you’ve got huge aspirations and you’re out to change the world. You gotta start somewhere, this is our 1.0.

Has anyone used it before?  I’m interested in hearing thoughts.  How does it compare to Amarok, or is it different enough that there is no comparison?  Have you noticed that in all the pictures of the Songbird mascot, it looks like it’s farting?

• Songbird Blog
• Ars Technica

Whitehouse

Change Congress, the Participatory Culture Foundation, and Mozilla have released open-government.us, a set of guidelines for President Elect Obama when dealing with

You can read the rationale for the principles at open-government.us. Put briefly, the three principles are:

1. No Legal Barrier to Sharing (law (copyright law) should not block sharing);2. No Technological Barrier to Sharing (code (limitations on downloads, for example) should not block sharing;

3. Free competition (no alliances should favor one commercial entity over another, or commercial over noncommercial entities).

Some have framed these as “demands” made of the administration. That’s like saying the mouse can make demands of the lion. We’re not making demands; we’re describing good policy. Or at least, good policy as we see it.

“Ideally, that format should be nonproprietary. But so long as the content is freely licensed (Principle #1), and free access is secured (Principle #2), transcoding would not be inhibited.” Is that really true?  I never figured out just how legal that was.  What about royalties?  Doesn’t that inhibit transcoding?  Come on, just make clear statements.  if he doesn’t meet them, he doesn’t meet them.  I guess the point is to make room for people to fail, and still be considered successful.  I think it’s silly.  When the Wheeler Declaration was being drafted, point #3, “The university embraces free software and open standards”, used to have a postfix that read something like “when such an alternative exists”.  In both of these cases, I think it’s silly to add the padding.

• Lessig.org
• open-government.us

Facebook - Credit: facebook.com

Facebook has announced it’s plans to have Facebook Connect on several major websites such as Digg.  This accomplishes the same thing that OpenID does, but it’s not OpenID.

Still, some on OpenID’s side see a silver lining here.

“Facebook Connect is one of the best thing to happen to OpenID,” says Plaxo vice president of marketing John McCrea. “It’s an elegant login implementation, not built on the open stack, but it accomplishes the same things promised by the open stack.”

…Another hurdle: Facebook Connect was developed independently using proprietary code, so Facebook’s system and OpenID are not interoperable. Data gathered by Facebook Connect on a third-party site can only go one place once it leaves — straight back into Facebook.

How is this good news?

• Wired

Open Office - Credit: OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org has created a new project, Rennaissance, to improve the GUI of their program.

Project Renaissance, to rethink the graphical user interface (GUI) and interaction of OpenOffice.org, was announced on OOoCon 2008 and has been officially launched this week. Renaissance is a long running project and will start from scratch, so please do not expect to see something in OOo 3.1.

…

The Problem

Why do we run this project?

• OpenOffice.org users complain about its cumbersome and outdated graphical user interface (GUI)
• A great deal of functionality is hidden in many overstuffed toolbars, poorly structured menus and complex dialogs
• Functions are thus difficult to access for novice users or too inefficient to use for expert users
• In addition, the GUI offers an antiquated look & feel which is hardly capable to communicate innovation and to create joy of use

Our Mission

“Create a User interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users’ choice not only out of need but also out of desire.”

Sounds good. When can I have it? This sounds like it might be a while.

• GullFOSS
• Open Enterprise

Debian - Credit: debian.org

The AGPL has been declared free by the Debian Free Software Guidelines.  This is considered a very important step for the success of the AGPL.

Late last week, the FTP Masters of Debian — who, absent a vote of the Debian developers, make all licensing decisions — posted their ruling that AGPLv3 is DFSG-Free. I was glad to see this issue was finally resolved after months of confusion; the AGPLv3 is now approved by all known FLOSS licensing ruling bodies (FSF, OSI, and Debian).

It was somewhat fitting that the AGPLv3 was approved by Debian within a week of the one year anniversary of AGPLv3’s release. This year of AGPLv3 has shown very rapid adoption of the AGPL. Even conservative numbers show an adoption rate of 15 projects per month. I expect the numbers to continue a steady, linear climb as developers begin to realize that the AGPL is the “copyleft of the Cloud”.

Are your clouds are belong to us.

• autonomo.us
• bugs.debian

Change.gov - Credit: change.gov

change.gov has removed their copyright notice, and replaced it with a CC BY notice.

Consistent with the values of any “open government,” and with his strong leadership on “free debates” from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license.

…

I’m glad the thought in this administration led to the right conclusion, so quickly, and in the midst of so much else going on.

Crazy cool.

• Lessig.org

Atheros - Credit: atheros.com

The source for the Atheros HAL, which has kept fully-free distros from being able to work properly on a large amount of hardware, has finally been released under a GPL compatible license.

Sam Leffler, maintainer of the binary HAL that is also used in MadWifi releases, has released the source code for his HAL variant under ISC license. It is available through a Subversion repository (web interface), which is also be used actively for development and further improvements.

In his announcement, Sam states:

Coincident with the release of this code I have concluded my agreement with Atheros whereby I had access to information about their devices. This means that in the future all fixes, updates for new chips, etc. will need to be a community effort. Atheros states the Linux platform will be the reference public code base so folks wanting to add support for other platforms will have to scrape the information from there.

Yay, one more step towards freeeing my eeepc!

• Madwifi
• Slashdot