some people want to implement this DRM support and some others want to use this support.
freedom in this scenario is more akin to "you are free to choose" above "you should pick one of the free choices".
some people will decide for paid products and some people will consume closed source "evil corporation" software.
... while it IS "anti ethical" to some of its founders, it should be an individual choice of each user, after all its my machine, and i don’t have to care about what Stallman/whatever says I should or shouldn’t do with my stuff, the same way they have their right to tell me to go fuck myself for my choices.
Great point, if users want it, they should be able to use it for Linux. Hopefully this gets 4K working on streaming platforms now.
I just fear that HDCP is a Trojan Horse. It’s used to protect DRM content since its inception, but the powers that be can use it to control what you see on your screen. Feels like it will be abused given enough time.
* more people get more fed up with microsoft + gaming on linux gets more popular
* some few distros will be very oriented for closed source drm heavy software.
in this scenario the regular Debian "i wont install binary blobs on my machine" folks wont get affected, but certainly there will be "blackbox linux" distros with the "i have no idea what i am running" binary blobs kind of environment.
If the word is: "hey, you need this distro to play netflix drm content at 4k" a lot of people would pick that over the regular "opener source" stuff.
if it were viable to have some sort of "witchcraft, undecipherable, untamperable" linux pseudo variant that allows for intrusive anti cheat software for the games that dont support regular linux, we would be there already. I know I would be using that for being the "lesser crap than windows 11" that lets me play my comercial multiplayer games.
on the other side, if the day comes that "Linux from now onwards officially forces HDCP" the regular purist would ignore that without many problems... thanks to open source! and we would probably call this fork something else.
... therefore maybe this trojan horse is sign of the end, but mostly as the end of the "main brand name" and not of its forks.