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well I do actually.... GNU/Vidomi

Mo Zilla
I know that is not what you wanted to hear... But I had to say it...

Vidomi Killer media player and network distributed media encoder

I have been doing xDSL installs for a few years and I have noticed a strange thing...

All of your big boy companies have crappy passwords. PacBell (now SBC say their commercials) I have found to be the worst... When I notify the customer they all have the same reaction *blank_look*what password*/blank_look*.

In contrast some of the smaller xDSL providers seem to be more on the ball with these things.

I usually change the password and write down the password and network info then tape it to the top of the modem with my company tech support number. What really gets me mad is the big boy providers never even bother to tell their clients about the need to change the password... I mean how goddamn hard is it to tell em that.

One more thing... one more luggage joke and I'm going to have to kill someone...


Vidomi Killer media player and network distributed video encoder.

Yeah! Right on... I played with apache MP3 M3U for a few minutes and presto! streaming blog.
No bullshit
No media server
No big media companies
No *special* client
It ust works

I'm also looking into streaming XviD for video just need a faster pipe (or hosting service).
I must be missing something, somewhere because all of these websites I visit stream video in Real or MS mediaplayer. Why? M3U and a good MPEG1 stream or a MPEG4 (XviD?) would work so well and I would not need a *special* client. Most modern media players understand the whole M3U thing and deal with it fine. *shrug* I dunno.

IS there a reason that they use one of these streaming servers... I mean a technical reason... or is it just a brand recognition thing...


Vidomi Kick ass media player and network distributed video encoder.

Read Google Cache of VirtualDub's Vidomi News Page or Vidomi.com itself.

Vidomi is a badass little program to turn mpg, vob, ... into DivX. One of the recently added features is "Distributed Encoding" (read: Scalability via network slaves).

This answer your question?

Let me clarify: I observe that this company is small because their product is not widely known. I also observe that this company has gone to the extraordinary length to publish a "Credit Where Credit Is Due" page on their website, to specifically single out the software developers whose work made the program possible.

GPL aside, isn't this type of public credit exactly what we want authors of open-source software to get? It seems to be to be a pretty good world where, if I do hard work and create a valuable algorithm and open it to the public, I am recognized when people use it.

Yes, it stings when someone else makes money off your hard work: I've had it happen to my code, and I felt dumb for not making that money myself. But if I open my code to the world and yet limit its use to other people willing to open their code to the world, I'm not really opening my code to the world ... only to my own little close-knit community.

Thoughts?

You are wrong. Look at their "interpretation" of the GPL. What they say is that using function calls to GPL'ed is OK as it "only" interacts with the software.

It seems to me that their product relies on the features of readily available libraries, and for the convenience of the users, they were shipping them together.

Imagine you write an application in Java... the Sun JVM is freely downloadable, so you can expect the user to go get it himself. But for the convenience of the user, some companies bundle the JVM with the product. Not a really big licensing issue. And besides, for the GPL components, they are making the source code available.

This is like saying that any application that runs on Linux must be GPL'd because it relies on the open source platform. As much as we'd like that, the license does not actually require it.

I think this will be worked out without any litigation and that when everyone gets together and talks about it, they'll find everyone is within their rights.

--brian

Looks like (relevant parts of) the source code is available right here. Could be a short case.

Actually, your statement (and theirs) would be true if the VirtuaDub code was released under the LGPL, but it's not, it's under the GPL, so removing it to a library (in this case a DLL) isn't good enough. You're right, it should be a short case. They violated the GPL, they should quickly lose.

--

posting this? http://www.vidomi.com/index.php?artid=6#news
Also for those don't want to load the page they have three interesting news bits, the first is titled "Credit where Credit is due. They acknowledge the following sites
http://hiroko.ee.ntu.edu.tw/
http://www.freeamp.org/
http://www.flaskmpeg.net
http://www.virtualdub.org/
http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/

Then they have a link to the source at this url http://www.vidomi.com/download.php?op=mydown&did=3
The next item reports that they will no longer allow download of the GPL'd items with the non GPL'd items, and that they will shortly release a GPL kit.
Where's the problem?

posting this? http://www.vidomi.com/index.php?artid=6#news
Also for those don't want to load the page they have three interesting news bits, the first is titled "Credit where Credit is due. They acknowledge the following sites
http://hiroko.ee.ntu.edu.tw/
http://www.freeamp.org/
http://www.flaskmpeg.net
http://www.virtualdub.org/
http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/

Then they have a link to the source at this url http://www.vidomi.com/download.php?op=mydown&did=3
The next item reports that they will no longer allow download of the GPL'd items with the non GPL'd items, and that they will shortly release a GPL kit.
Where's the problem?

We at Vidomi respect licenses and copyrights. From the beginning, we evaluated the GPL license to determine how to be in compliance. We have been explicit about how Vidomi can have increased functionality using GPL code, any revisions Vidomi made to GPL code have been licensed under the GPL and the source code for this GPL code is available for free at Vidomi (opensourcerelease.zip at http://www.vidomi.com/download.php).

The following language from paragraph 2 of the GPL explicitly concludes that it is possible for a program to in some way interact with GPL code and yet the proprietary independent and separate work not have to be licensed under the GPL:

"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works....Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program."

We believe we are in compliance with these terms of the GPL (as well as others).

At the same time, we are interested in constructive feedback as to interpretation of the GPL license and Vidomi's approach to compliance with the license. We have been in on-going discussions with Avery Lee, author of Virtual Dub, for about a month, and just two days ago received from Avery more constructive feedback which we are now evaluating and will respond to soon. We welcome the community's input on this issue and will evaluate feedback to determine if we should make any adjustments to how Vidomi interacts with GPL code.

dean@vidomi.com

We at Vidomi respect licenses and copyrights. From the beginning, we evaluated the GPL license to determine how to be in compliance. We have been explicit about how Vidomi can have increased functionality using GPL code, any revisions Vidomi made to GPL code have been licensed under the GPL and the source code for this GPL code is available for free at Vidomi (opensourcerelease.zip at http://www.vidomi.com/download.php).

The following language from paragraph 2 of the GPL explicitly concludes that it is possible for a program to in some way interact with GPL code and yet the proprietary independent and separate work not have to be licensed under the GPL:

"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works....Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program."

We believe we are in compliance with these terms of the GPL (as well as others).

At the same time, we are interested in constructive feedback as to interpretation of the GPL license and Vidomi's approach to compliance with the license. We have been in on-going discussions with Avery Lee, author of Virtual Dub, for about a month, and just two days ago received from Avery more constructive feedback which we are now evaluating and will respond to soon. We welcome the community's input on this issue and will evaluate feedback to determine if we should make any adjustments to how Vidomi interacts with GPL code.

dean@vidomi.com

--Bob

Here is a link to a dicussion about this topic on their site, including giving credit to those poor GNU souls. Probably added this after your post :)

I don't get it. Why do you post this crap when real GPL violations by shady companies are currently going on? How many times must the story of Vidomi ripping Avery Lee's GPLed code to VirtualDub be submitted before the Slashdot editors stop ignoring it?

*cough* vidomi *cough* Ask Avery Lee how he feels about GPL violators. Why does Slashdot not post a story on this regardless of the fact that a few hundred people have submitted it? You're guess is as good as mine. Maybe they're too busy posting linux is dying trolls to the front page.

The other side of the story is on their site.