The Reg has a couple of excellent articles summarising up-coming problems for the world of open computing. The first threat is in the form of digital rights management, which far from being a way to prevent piracy, is actually a way to make sure you have to pay for DRM enabled software to be able to access any content.
Threat number two is from Microsoft working with hardware “partners” such as HP to specify hardware platforms, bypassing any kind of open standards setting. Or as Bill puts it, getting “rid of some of the impedance created by the organizational boundary between us and those partners.” The problem here is that the point of the excercise is to make sure Windows drivers are available first, and no information is made available for other software vendors or writers of open source software to provide drivers for their platforms. Windows wins because only it can support the hardware.
In the past, open source software authors have been very innovative when it comes to reverse engineering hardware to write drivers. But DMCA-like laws create a new problem, especially when hardware involves anything related to digital rights management. Writing a device driver may soon land you in jail, if it can be seen as circumventing DRM. Because if you write open source software, you’re stealing from artists, obviously…