What convinces me that it wouldn't fly is that the main source of revenue for OSs are corporate customers. Corporates are mostly very conservative. If MS tell them that in order to upgrade their 1000s of workstations, they will also have to re-write every application they use; or apply in writing to MS (or any 3rd party body), to have their existing in-house and 3rd party applications 'signed off', the impact of the upgrade would just be too costly and too risky to contemplate.

Can you imagine every bank, government dept. etc., having to supply the source code of their proprietary and commercially sensitive applications to MS or some 3rd party clearing house organisation before they can run them? I'm very convinced that any such requirement would be death to the OS.

IMO, there would *have* to be some 'self-sign certification' option. Indeed, I would welcome a process that prevented an executable from running on my system until I had explicitly, manually, (with-no-possibility-for-programmable-override), authorised it. A minor inconvenience during the development cycle, but it would prevent the vast majority of viruses, trojans and spyware.

I essentially do this now for applications that attempt socket communications via my firewall. If it extended to all executables, that would be a good thing in my opinion--but only if *I* control what is allowed to run. And what not.

I agree that there are some worrying precedents for people accepting the diminution of there rights in consumer products--iPod is the latest, greatest, most worrying example--but I think that corporates are unlikely to surrender their rights quite so easily.

My take on DRM and similar technologies, and anything that purports to sell me something but then curtails my rights to use it as I see fit, is that I simply do not buy them. If everybody followed suit, they simply wouldn't get off the ground, but that is a forlorn hope in many areas of consumer products--game consoles, mp3 players, DVD players, mobile phones, ISP connections etc.

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

In reply to Re^5: Future of Perl on Win32? by BrowserUk
in thread Future of Perl on Win32? by bowei_99

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