On 10/05/2014 07:55 PM, Pierre Schweitzer wrote:
I'd like to highlight some major point in the end: the user must be free. That's IMHO the most important thing, and this shouldn't be forgotten.
I agree with Pierre here.
When the Firefox-DRM issue came up initially (around May), I talked to a Mozilla developer (who's a Fellow) about this. Here's a short summary of the key points as he explained them to me:
If I understood the developer correctly, then there's no proprietary code in Firefox (FF). Even pre-built binaries by Mozilla.
Firefox will install Adobe's DRM module on-demand on an opt-in basis, when the users opens a website which would require DRM to play content (e.g. Netflix).
For convenience reasons, the proprietary module is downloaded by Firefox automatically *before* any DRM-requiring site is opened, so it is immediately installed and useable on-demand. On Freedom-aware distros (e.g. Debian), I imagine that they will change the default behavior to *not* automatically download any propietary extension modules.
So, like most of us Free Software users already do on a daily basis, we decide which services (e.g. sites) we use, and which we don't. With FF offering the option to support DRM-requiring sites, this choice is still in the hand of the end-user.
Something that might also be worth knowing is, that the current situation is, that DRM-requesting sites only serve their content to users who run Flash or Silverlight - not as HTML5. Flash and Silverlight both run as Firefox plugin, whereas the DRM-module runs in a (newly implemented) sandbox.
According to the developer, FF-Plugins have way more access to the system than this sandbox has/will have. Additionally, the unique-IDs required by DRM-proponents (e.g. Hollywood, Sony) to be generated in order to comply to the HTML5-DRM-Standard implementation, are calculated and provided by FF's sandbox. Therefore, FF controls how (and if) unique-IDs are generated.
I'm not saying I'm fine/happy with Mozilla's decision, but the bright side might be that this chess-move probably will help them to keep their voice in e.g. W3C decisions, because they will very likely lose less users by enabling FF to watch DRM-requiring sites.
And I'd also like to highlight what Pierre already said: It's about giving users freedom. In my book, that includes the freedom of choice.
Regards, Pb