Real Announce Helix Grant Program, Player

Rob Lanphier writes "RealNetworks made two announcements at LinuxWorld this week: we will be giving out up to $75,000 by the end of the year for development of open source projects based on the Helix multimedia platform. Also, we just formally launched the Helix Player project, which is a project to build a GTK+ based user interface for Linux, Solaris, and other UNIXy operating systems. Press releases for the grant program here and player project here"

Comments

could be cool

[didjit]

sounds like this could be a good thing. the older versions of real player for linux worked with moderate success. but they were shoved far out of reach on the real site like that guy in office space who likes his stapler so much. the versions weren't quite current and the players were sub-standard compared to the windows version. it'd be nice if they released a decent media player for linux and even better if it were open sourced.

Re:It's still a good thing

[GigsVT]

No, it's not a good thing, and you are completely wrong about Adobe.

Adobe has supported open source more than most people know (or care to believe).

I don't particularly like Adobe either, but as a company, they aren't half bad. They have released the postscript and PDF specs, in full, for free, and the license allows anyone to write an implementation of them, without royalty or encumberment.

This has been an incredible boon for open source and Free Software. If you think printing in Linux sucks now, just imagine how bad it would have been had Adobe been dicks about PS and PDF standards. Adobe is way ahead of the game...

They realized they can make more money by getting a fully open standard adopted, rather than trying to force a closed standard down everyone's throats, and face competing standards that do basically the same time.

We would be downloading 3rd party open source postscript and PDF interperters from overseas to avoid patents, like we have to do now with mplayer codecs.

What Real is doing is a sham. They don't give a fuck about Free Software, this is just their way of trying to get in on that "Linux thing" without actually giving a little.

I know that Elcomsoft ordeal has left a bad taste in people's mouths, but we can't forget that Adobe isn't an unconditional enemy, they have been a strong ally in the past, and hopefully they saw the error in their ways regarding the DMCA.

Re:It's still a good thing

[benwaggoner]

Nothing difficult about making a good GUI? I give you exhibit A: MPlayer. Dozens of different UIs available, all terrible.

Nothing difficult about network code for streaming media? Huh? You've got to deal with client/server communication over a lossy connection using UDP, doing retransmission of packets, buffering, doing scalable switching between streams. Doing this well is at least of the same order of difficulty as a good codec.

Re:It's still a good thing

[Lord_Dweomer]

The other good business practice of Adobe that I'd like to point out is this:

Photoshop has to be THE most pirated piece of software on the internet. Does Adobe know this? Yes. Do they do much? No. Why? Because they realize that they are getting everybody hooked on it. And when these people go to their job, and need to use graphics software, what are they gonna say to the person who buys it? "Get me Adobe Photoshop." I mean, aside from freelancers, corporations are the only ones willing to pony up the 600 bucks or whatever it runs these days. And you know what? Last I checked, Adobe wasn't doing half bad financially. The RIAA and other companies could learn something from them.