Slashdot Mirror

Also it's supported by a major online music provider e-Music.com so I think it actually has a chance of sticking arount.

subsolar

Its designed to completely supercede CDDB by providing a free and open database for information without the cumbersome album model and cumbersome license agreements. Its being sponsored by Emusic.com and Relatable.com.

The project leader is Robert Kaye. He's currently at Burning Man so he's not here to defend himself.

Jacob Everist
jeverist@fairtunes.com

Perhaps the CDIndex (soon to be musicbrainz.org) people can answer this: would it be possible to merge the efforts of FreeDB and Musicbrainz? It seems very wasteful to duplicate the effort for a free CDDB replacement, not just for the project developers but for the end users typing in track info for both. I'm specifically wondering whether

• the licences are compatible - CDIndex has its own licence which might conflict with the GPL
• the underlying structure is compatible.

The second question strikes me as particularly important - CDIndex is moving to a completely track-based design that should be media independent and make up for the limitations of the CDDB formula. The problem with this is that temporary backward compatibility with the CDDB would be a real asset in allowing people to use CDDB-enabled clients of various kinds and simply point them at a different server. It also better allows for the quiet updating people have been doing with clients like grip, where the CDDB info is re-uploaded from the client machine to FreeDB, slowly mirroring the database. To my knowledge, CDIndex has never been compatible with the CDDB format (even before switching to the track-based musicbrainz format).

There are two alternatives that I know of: freedb, which is cddb compatible, and CD index, that is more feature-rich. Both are open source and promise to be open source forever.

From the Ask Slashdot:
I am concerned about the ownership rights to this compilation. The useage agreements seem reasonable enough now, but what assurance is there that this work will not become just another asset of the Time/Warner/AOL (read Netscape) media empire?

Your post:
Is this really the right place to be asking this? Maybe you could just read the license instead.

Okay, I don't want to sound like an asshole but "What does your post have to do with the question?". The original poster is worried about how possible it would be for AOL, which has a liberal open content license with respect to dmoz currently, to decide to start exerting ownership rights and using proprietary practices with the dmoz project?

This is a very valid question and here's my answer. It is very possible for AOL to change the licensing agreements and become a ball buster with the dmoz project. Look no further than CDDB which changed it's license after being bought out by corporate interests and becoming a big enough entity. Of course, the solution to this is for there to be several such open services so that even if 1 of them becomes corrupted by greed the others will flourish and take it's place (like CD Index or FreeCDDB are replacements for CDDB).

The original poster also asks about Open Content Licenses and since I just read 30 posts and none of them mentioned this I'll also try to answer this question.

As to whether Open Content Licenses are practical, I say Yes, after all the dmoz project's license has proved this.

Please make sure the openbsd people get it, too. Any idea how much difficulty it is to cross-port between the two? My guess is that it's trivial. Yes if that were true, you'd think we'd see more ports than we do.

Sure, it will be much more easier than porting from Linux. I just installed openssh on my box - the first FreeBSD port I ever saw, that fetches not some tarball somewhere but does an anonymous CVS checkout from OpenBSD.org's tree. Wow.

Indeed I feel great sympathy and admiration for the other BSD projects and would love to make it cross BSD. My problem is tracking the differences and testing.

Example:
In theory, I already put in OpenBSD and NetBSD support for another project I work on, the CD Index client. This was attempted by studying the man pages from these systems, that are available on the German FreeBSD web server. But I never tested it out so far, because I simply have no machine running OpenBSD or NetBSD or access to one.

Even if I had a second box running OpenBSD for example, I doubt somewhat, that I would follow development here as closely, as I would for FreeBSD. It is just a matter of personal preference and limited time resources.

So I believe the various projects should hold test accounts ready for volunteers from the other projects who are willing to test and adapt their stuff, but who are not willing or able to keep up a test system themselves. I would be very happy to get such a opportunity, as ported software seems better to me in the sense that it forces one to better program organization. Maybe one of the reasons why usually UNIX software is of good quality.

An extension to add Karaoke/sub titling should be found here. I say should, because the link does not work right now (strange), so I provide a link to this mail. This should give you a basic idea until the link is working again.

An extension to add Karaoke/sub titling should be found here. I say should, because the link does not work right now (strange), so I provide a link to this mail. This should give you a basic idea until the link is working again.

I don't know the sociologist definitions of groups and collectives but I think one of the central aspects is that they spend time together and have common interests and goals.

For Slashdot it holds, that this is a place where we exchange information and build opinions together in our discussions. This is enough to form a larger group like that what we describe as Slashdot community, but except for the small group of Slashdot operators, this is not enough to form smaller groups and circle of friends centered around the Slashdot theme.

However Slashdot serves very well as a place where groups are formed and spawned from.

Take the CD Index project for example. It was formed spontaneously after a news on Slashdot was posted that cddb went commercial in a questionable way. A discussion followed, someone offered resources (among them the obligatory mailing list devoted to that goal) and the project started off. With one of that folks I maintain something close to a classical pen pal friendship, mostly centered around our common goal of building up a free CD database, but with exchanges of personal stuff as well.

Slashdot might not only be suited well to spawn technical projects, but considering that we shape opinion here (this is the thing we build together), I would be not surprised to see having politcal groups having their initial point of gathering here (shouting out the geek party or declaration of the rights of cyber citizens or some cybernation).

What are you talking?

marc> uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-4.0 PC_108 20.1 (0.3/1/1) 1998-12-3 20:39:18 i686 unknown
marc> ./configure
loading cache ./config.cache
checking for a BSD compatible install... (cached) /mvw/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking whether make sets ${MAKE}... (cached) yes
checking for working aclocal... found
checking for working autoconf... found
checking for working automake... found
checking for working autoheader... found
checking for working makeinfo... found
checking host system type... i686-pc-cygwin
checking for mawk... (cached) gawk
checking for gcc... (cached) gcc
checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) works... yes
checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) is a cross-compiler... no
checking whether we are using GNU C... (cached) yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... (cached) yes
checking for c++... (cached) c++
checking whether the C++ compiler (c++ ) works... yes
checking whether the C++ compiler (c++ ) is a cross-compiler... no
checking whether we are using GNU C++... (cached) yes
checking whether c++ accepts -g... (cached) yes
checking for a BSD compatible install... /mvw/bin/install -c
checking whether ln -s works... (cached) yes
checking whether byte ordering is bigendian... (cached) no
checking size of long... (cached) 4 updating cache ./config.cache
creating ./config.status
creating Makefile
creating config.h
linking ./cdi_cygwin.cpp to cdi.cpp
linking ./cdi_cygwin.h to cdi.h
marc>

Works like a dream.. allows for an easy portation, like here of the CD Index client to Win32.