Oh, don't be pedantic, they bought the company that built it.

If anything, it will impact closed-source adopters of those projects. Open-source projects, by definition, have no problem in distributing their source code.

So they develop a complex software project in-house, they give it away for free, they put it under a well-respected, user-friendly, open source, free software license, and we attack them because that might scare away commercial freeriders lest they'd have to provide a link to the source code in case they modify it and then use it on a web site?

Bah, I must be getting old, because this looks completely unreasonable to me.

Did Google et al give data to the NSA or not? If they did, why should I care about what their disposition was when they did it?

They shouldn't work with a full DRM stack including video drivers. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa376846(v=vs.85).aspx

Android locks the user into a firmware jail, so that he can't interfere with the platform DRM. Android devices that support "rooting" will clear the phone storage before giving the user root access, and applications providing DRM-exclusive content (I don't know about Netflix, but I know that the Sky app behaves this way) will refuse to run on a "rooted" device.

There is no industry standard for DRM in HTML5. The EME proponents didn't agree on any DRM standard. For stupid political reasons, all theirs.

Before: in order to watch Netflix, you needed an HTML browser AND the Flash plugin.
Now: in order to watch Netflix, you need Internet Explorer 11 on Windows. Firefox, Chrome and Linux users need not apply.
Where's the practical, workable value of this evolution?

But not on Linux (or any other free operating system). Otherwise the DRM would be ineffective, as one could simply rip the rich, premium videos by running Firefox, the matching Linux plugin and, say, recordmydesktop. DRM plugins for Linux cannot, and will not, happen.

Without OS support, the DRM-in-a-plugin would be easily cracked, for instance by copying the output of the plugin before it's sent to the screen.

You can't implement DRM in open source, so Firefox and Linux are out of the question. Chrome will probably implement some EME-compliant DRM, since Google are among the main proponents of EME. But you'll probably have to run it under a closed OS, such as Windows or (unrooted) Android in order to make it work.

EME = having Flash, Silverlight, whatnot encysted in HTML, forever.

Even worse, as CDMs aren't really meant to be implemented as browser plugins, we'll end up with sites that work only in a specific browser, or in a specific OS, or even in a specific OS under certain circumstances.

More than 95% of the population actually have a life that goes beyond watching youtube and reading reduced versions of web sites. For example they'll have to work.

They'll want, sooner or later, to use office, to embed a movie clip into a powerpoint slide, to collect the pictures from their digital camera, to open large zipped files, to send a properly formatted email, to read a DVD with video clips from their 2004 holidays, to play a game beyond the limited subset allowed by touch controls, to make a video chat while they're working on a document, to access that web site that requires Flash or even Java.

And even when the stuff they want to do can be done on a tablet, the user experience there is clumsy and the applications are almost always limited - many essential features are outright missing because the "app" designers give for granted that the user will use a desktop PC in order to access them.

In that case you have to fix your government first, for a government that is allowed to do maneuvers behind the back of the people who elected it, can screw them in much more severe ways other than installing cameras in their back yards.

Not if both of you want to be in the same place.

And they're free to ignore your request, to lie to you about the thing being disabled, and/or film your reaction and upload it to YouTube.

On the contrary, people have the right to interrogate the authorities about the images they're collecting and the scope of the collection. They can propose laws regulating, limiting or even preventing the collection. They can elect politicians who are against it, and vote against, or no longer vote for, the politicians who are in favour of it.

BSD : Software Licenses = SONY : Companies

It's true that the GPL isn't particularly indicated for documentation, but the problem here is that the license they've chosen is much worse, it's non-free. You can't even distribute printed copies of the manpages without authorization from Oracle!