Blogging Ottinger (tim)

I’m getting pretty sick of this.

It seems that the new corporate strategy of the 21st century it to try like the devil to ensure that people cannot use your products. I guess it’s success through failure or some other stupid and pointless strategy. Now, don’t give me that talk about how vendors need control of their products — that’s hogwash. They need to sell them and to sell lots of them and may be to sell supplies and services that go with them.

Example 1: RIAA (including Sony and BMG) try like the devil to keep you from listening to the music you buy from them. They don’t want you to make it useful and make it part of your lifestyle. Doggone it, Pepsi is happy for you to wear their Tee-shirts, but heaven forbid you should listen to your CD on your computer. And heaven help you if you want to get it on your MP3 player (that you may have purchased from Sony!?!). No, no, no. They don’t want you to make use of their products.

Example 2: The MPAA companies don’t want you to watch their videos, or at least only under closely-controlled laboratory conditions. What’s that for? How is that paying them? They load up on DRM protection measures that are ultimately defeated by a sharpie marker or piece of tape or a snippet of software that any noob can download from p2p.

Example 3: Hardware vendors not releasing drivers or specs. I guess they don’t want to see their products used in new an innovative ways, and must avoid at all costs any opportunity that some programmers in their basement or den might come up with a killer app that gives their company the coveted “Halo Effect” and starts a mad buying spree. Can’t have that. Not only would that be success, it would be popularity too. Somehow, that doesn’t make it on the corporate agenda.

Maybe it’s time to loosen up… unclench the cheeks… think this over one more time. Why is it you don’t want us to use your stuff?

The bee in my bonnet right now is that I own three (COUNT THEM: THREE!!!!) wireless internet cards. How many have linux drivers? None. BSD? Don’t even think it. Mac? Maybe one. I guess that people who are clever early adopters and who are willing to try new things, and might start a trend or a new technology are not the kinds of people you want buying your products and using them. Heaven forbid!

Now, I run a proprietary NVidia driver on my laptop. Y’know what? If I couldn’t I wouldn’t use this laptop. I’ll not have windows on my home computers. Anything that runs windows-only is anathema to me. I am also a regular on the Tucson Free Users Group irc channel, and you ought to hear people complain about unsupported equipment (especially 802.11 equipment — network vendors take note). As one of them said tonight about hardware vendors releasing specs or drivers, “they would get into a whole untapped market.” Is that not exciting? I would LOVE to have a PCMCIA card that actually works, so I can spend my time learning to configure and secure it. I’m good for a lot of hardware recommendations. I will tout anything that works with Linux. I will pay the fair price. I might buy two or three. My friends would probably buy many more than I would.

Well, there’s that and more. I have seen enough of winModems and winPrinters and winJunk and winGarbage. I am now at a point in my life where I know relatively few windows-only users. Everyone uses Linux or Mac or BSD somewhere, and all those people are unable to use equipment that doesn’t have open-source drivers. Look at all the hype around Asterisk and the businesses growing up around this wonderful, programmable, free PBX. What if they couldn’t use the hardware? By the way, my Brother laserjet printer is awesome and has never given me even a minute of trouble. Same with the HP I have set up at my old church (in Avon). It seems to run all the time, and it doesn’t mind that I don’t pay a microsoft tax or install weirdo DRM. So there.

Kudos to the hardware providers and content vendors who have the guts and common sense to make their wares usable to the modern world.
Shame and nothing but shame for the control-mongering others.