LILUG General Meeting - Tuesday, 13 February, 2007
From Lilug
Meeting Summary
Speaker
- Matt Norwood - Anti-DRM provision in GNU GPL version 3 draft 2
- Matt Norwood, who works as legal counsel with the Software Freedom Law Center, gave a talk about Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues, especially in light of the upcoming new version 3 of the GNU Public License (GPL).
- In brief, Matt began with a discussion of the recent release by Microsoft of the Windows Vista operating system. Vista has a feature set that is troublesome to those against DRM. A few of these points that Matt highlighted were:
- The DRM system is built into the operating system, therefore there is a great deal of system resources devoted to running it, all for the sole purpose of maintaining protected content streams.
- There is an assumption that all so-called premium content requires some kind of third party approval.
- There is a built-in lock-in to hardware.
- The "Windows Defender" module
- Matt pointed out that MS Windows Vista is software that is really not meant to be owned by the user.
- Matt then went on to discuss the role of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), whose focus is to protect and advance free (libre) software, and to preserve the freedoms that define the movement.
- Further discussions were had surrounding other technologies using DRM (such as cell phones, Tivo, and wireless devices). This lead to the further notion that general purpose computing could end up becoming obsolete, highlighting the importance of efforts of groups such as the SFLC.
- Matt then wound up with a discussion specifically about version 3 of the GPL, and made these overall points about how it differs from version 2:
- Internationalization
- Language precision
- Implements principles set forth in version 2, and formalizes them with an "anti-lockdown" provision.
- All throughout the talk, several members in the audience asked Matt questions, which helped to shape much of this very interesting and informative presentation.
Discussions/Announcements
Possible Change To Parking Procedure at LILUG
- LILUG President Matt Newhall mentioned that Farmingdale State College Security may change the way we park at meetings. While this has not been officially decided, it's possible that we may be prevented from parking near Horton Hall without a properly issued long-term parking pass, which would be granted to all LILUG members who requested one. Matt will keep the group informed of any actual policy changes.
Raffles
- HP Laser Jet 1100 Printer: Ant
- Epson 800 Color Printer: Matthew D
- Apache/MySQL/PHP Book (Weekend Crash Course): Lou G
Msurico 00:05, 14 February 2007 (EST)