Good for business (Score 1)

One of the most common things I've read is the question "why would HD manufactuers want to sell one of these?" Much the same question as "why scramble cable TV" and "what's up with DVD reigional encoding?"

The answer is simple: it's good for both of them. How? All the software boys put out new software that needs this shit and stop supporting the old stuff. All the HD boys put out drives with this system and ditch the old ones. Win-win situation. If somone wants a new piece of software, they need a disk with this on it. Where do they get one? From buying it from the software guys. That way, both sides make more cash. Just like putting out a new version of Windows - everybody buys one, well, "because."

Not to provoke a flame war (or troll call), but how important (in the scheme of things) is the free software movement? We'd all find a way around it, use *nix and have an non-copyrighted party. But do we ~2% of the computing population make enough of a difference to Dell or IBM?