LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 25

RealNetworks goes open source - sort of

With a fair amount of hype, RealNetworks announced, on July 22, its new "Helix" platform. Helix, it is said, is an open platform for the management, delivery and playback of streaming media in multiple formats. As a way of showing how open the platform is, RealNetworks pulled in Eric Raymond to endorse the new scheme:

This all sounds good. A closer look turns up a lower degree of openness than one might wish for, though there is an open source component to this release.

There are three components to the Helix system, being the "Helix DNA Encoder," "Helix DNA Server," and the "Helix DNA Client." The client, of course, is the code that sits on a desktop (or within a web browser, or elsewhere) and receives and plays back a media stream. This code will be released (in 90 days) under the RealNetworks Public Source License (RPSL). The RPSL is GPLish, in that it includes the usual copyleft provisions: if you distribute a modified version of the code, you must distribute source under the same license. The RPSL does have a couple of features not found in the GPL, however:

• The license explicitly excludes "runtime libraries," which are dynamicly linked into the client, from the copyleft provisions. This exclusion is there, of course, to allow the distribution of proprietary codecs.

• When you release modifications under the RPSL, RealNetworks gets the right to use your code in any way it wants, including incorporation into proprietary products.

This license will eventually be submitted to the Open Source Initiative for certification as "open source." It may require some modification first: there are claims, for example, that the jurisdiction and export provisions in section 13.7 make the software non-free. Users are, among other things, unable to distribute the software to the "Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan."

The client code has not actually been released yet, so it is difficult to say for sure what will be in it. One thing that will not be there, however, is a codec for the proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats. So there will still be no completely free player for these formats for Linux. It will be possible, however, to use the client to make a (nice, presumably) 100% free player for Ogg Vorbis streams. In fact, RealNetworks is working with Xiph.Org to do exactly that.

The Encoder product (which creates media streams) and the Server (which manages the whole thing) will not be open source; instead, they will be available under the RealNetworks Community Source License (RCSL). This license provides access to the source, but does not allow redistribution without the payment of royalties. It is a "shared source" license which will be useful to those building products with RealNetworks code, but it is not particularly exciting for the free software community. Free software hackers working on streaming media projects may, in fact, want to stay away from RCSL-licensed code entirely to avoid any risk of "contaminating" their code with RealNetworks' intellectual property.

The end result is that the free software community will have more code than it did, and that is a good thing. With luck, RealNetworks will be successful with its new strategy, and will open more code in the future. (For more information, see the "Helix Community" web site).

Comments (2 posted)

Here come the copyright vigilantes

For a view into just how weird our world is becoming, have a look at this News.com article by Declan McCullagh. Mr. McCullagh got a chance to read a draft law by U.S. Representatives Howard Berman and Howard Coble that would legalize attacks against P2P networks:

This is worth stating again: somebody who claims that you might be violating their copyright will be legally allowed to attack your systems. You can not challenge the attacker in court without getting permission from a federal bureaucrat - who, one assumes, may not be particularly sympathetic to your cause.

For added fun, any "copyright holder" will be authorized to act in this fashion. As soon as, say, a copyrighted article is posted to Usenet, the owner of that article will have the right to take the whole thing down. If one makes the reasonable assumption that some people might just feel the need to retaliate against an attack of this nature, whether or not they are protected by federal law, it is not hard to foresee a time when the net is a rather more violent and unpleasant place than it is now.

It is hard to imagine this law actually passing - though it is dangerous to assume reasonable behavior in Washington these days. But the proposal is a clear sign of the sort of power grab that is underway. Not only do they want control over every bit that passes through your computer; they also want the ability to take justice into their own hands if they don't like your behavior. Stallman's The Right To Read looks more prophetic all the time.

Comments (2 posted)

The end of the road

Over the last several months we at LWN have looked at numerous ways of funding this operation. It takes people to write LWN, and it takes a lot of their time; it is not something that is easily handled on "off hours." Those people really would like to be paid for their time, and that is something which has not happened here for quite a while. Various approaches to bringing in money have been tried; the most successful of all was simply asking LWN readers for donations to keep the operation going. But we have not succeeded in raising even a fraction of the required funds.

Other options (such as subscriptions) have been considered in depth, but there is little promise (and much aggravation) to be found in that direction.

So the time has come to face the reality of the situation: what LWN is offering is not what the market is willing to pay for at this time. It's time to find something else to do.

The end result is that next week's LWN Weekly Edition (August 1) will be the last. This has not been an easy decision to make, to say the least. But, barring some sort of last minute miracle (do contact us if you have one, please!), we do not see any alternative.

We'll have more information next week on things like content tarballs and releasing the site source. Some parts of LWN may yet go on in a different form as well. But this particular journey is coming to an end. It has been a great ride.

Comments (127 posted)