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).

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