News Mozilla slammed over Firefox DRM scheme

freeware means free (of charge), not open source, and as far as I'm aware, is not redistributable either. Then there's stuff like shareware, which is redistributable, almost always free, but not specifically open source. A product is also allowed to be open source but not free or redistributable. To complicate things further, software can be free, open source, and/or redistributable, but it doesn't mean the libraries or extensions used by the software also apply.

Firefox is really difficult to ACCURATELY classify because it isn't 100% free, open source, or redistributable. That's where iceweasel comes in, which is supposed to be all of those things.

 

Surely a group of people who support and contribute to a project which is aligned with their ideals should remark when that project takes a step away from that ideal.

Also the very fact that the term "free as in beer or free as in freedom" exists is a testament to the inffectiveness of the term "free software". It's a useless ambiguous term.

 

True, but the objectionable plugin is optional. People can take it or leave it. I don't think the Linux foundation would argue for instance that people cannot write proprietary software to run on their free, open source OS.

 

I think it's safe to say the terms used to describe the different types of software are very confusing, as to me freeware means free software under certain conditions, that is not open source, and is freely redistributable.

Shareware is the same as freeware, that is not open source, is freely redistributable, but with limits on what can be done without paying for it, such as only the first episode of DOOM, or WinRAR's 40 day limit.

IDK If all open source software is free (no cost) or not, but i would guess by the way the code is open to anyone to modify if they wish, that it would be difficult to charge money for something that is open source.

 

This is true, but I believe the objection is not coming from the way it's included in the browser. The objection is that by supporting this EME at all they are...endorsing, the use of binary blobs and method of drm the free software foundation object to.

Now binaries like flash exist in the Firefox ecosphere. But I believe, this is the start of the end of plugin browser tech like java and flash. This was an opportunity to get things on the right path as the fsf see it. Something that would to them, be secure and open source. But things are just continuing down the same road of random unknown code living in your browser.

This is an important milestone, hence the objections.

 

But if the CDM was made open source wouldn't it be possible to bypass the decryption ?

 

Well truecrypt is open source, but it still encrypts things.

I'm not going to pretend to know about these things or what fsf actually want to see

 

Good point.
There is also the OpenSSL project that is used for more important encryption/decryption (imho) than DRM.
If FF and the FSF are so concerned how come they don't make an open source CDM.

 

How is Chrome not free? or Opera for that matter?

This all goes back to content publishers and there requirements for drm on stuff.

 

You can't take their source code and modify it for your needs and redistribute it without meeting their licensing requirements. Opera uses the Apache license: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0. Chrome includes proprietary code - when you remove that you are left with Chromium. That is a different browser.

Firefox uses http://opensource.org/licenses/MPL-2.0

 

This is a big issue for me. I recently tried to go to Linux on my media PC and had no end of problems with Netflix and then NowTV.
Pipelight worked for a time and then randomly stopped working. I also had issues with stutter during playback when it was working. This was better on Chrome bit still not great.

 

IW is Mozilla's FF alternative in Linux