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Real Feels iTunes Backlash
BunkAsInBed writes "CNET reports RealNetwork's recent campaign against the iTunes music network that involved tactics like slashing the costs of their downloads in half, reverse engineering Apple's FairPlay format (Harmony), and recently an online petition and bulliten board have received the opposite reponse that was anticpated."
Why do you assume that they are only targeting the Mac version? Last I checked, there were versions of both the iPod and the iTunes for Windows. Sure we (users of Apple's Windows products) are not the one's that Apple really cares about, but we do still exsist.
Slashdot...it's like Fox news, but without the biased sl...or maybe not.
I could see your point if they were stripping out DRM to create a DRM-less product. However, all they're doing is converting their DRM to Apple's DRM. This has nothing to do with arguments over DRM and its validity, and everything to do with whether or not Apple can control who can license its DRM technology.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
The full quote is "Competition' doesn't give you any right to reverse-engineer when you feel like it, but come down on those that hack into your IP rights."
The quoter claimed Real had no right to reverse engineer when the company itself will not allow others to reverse engineer. It's not about law, in the quote, but about reciprocity. If they think it's okay for Real Co to RE the iPod and iTunesMS, then it should be okay for others to reverse RA stuff as well, which you didn't pick up.
GPL Deconstructed
>Apple's codec sucks compared to even MP3
What was the format of those tracks? What bitrate? What makes you think Real is using their own codec for the iPod (It isn't, the iPod can't play RealAudio) What music store sells MP3's? (OK I know of ONE, but I doubt anyone has heard of any of it's bands) AAC compressed music actually sounds pretty good at comparable bitrates to MP3.
>I'll continue to stick to SHN/FLAC
Then your portable music player must have FLAC/SHN support and a gargantuan hard drive for the terrible 2:1 compression ratios you get. MP3/AAC usually gets about 10:1.
>Perhaps these Apple lovers have become so accustomed to vendor lock-in
You mean the way the Realaudio music store ONLY WORKS ON WINDOWS?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
So I thought, ok, I am an apple user, I have an ipod, there is a valid point about companies opening up their platforms. So I thought, let's try to buy a 50 cents song on the real site. "Mac not supported". Wankers.
You are confusing ACC and Fairplay. ACC is a compression format and is open and available for anyone to use. Fairplay is Apple's DRM and is basically proprietary, just like the grandparent poster stated.
Anyone can put make an ACC file and have it play on the iPod. What anyone cannot do is develop or sell a DRM format other than Fairplay and have the iPod understand and play it.
Apple has no control over ACC or who uses it.
The BBC made a deal with Real to dejunk their player or else the BEEB would ditch Real.
l
The dejunked player is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/audiohelp_install.shtm
So, if you must use Real, use this one and thank the BBC.
My father is a blogger.
Not trying to be negative, but is the base system & kernel open sourced from Apple or didn't Apple take somebody else's work and lock it down? In other words I have the understanding that Apple took FreeBSD which is somebodyelses hard work and added their own stuff on top without releasing the stuff on top or how it interacts with the stuff provided by FreeBSD, or any changes they might have made to FreeBSD to make it better.
Apple bought a company called NeXT that had a proprietary BSD386 based OS running on the Mach Micro-Kernal. In the company was an employee who had done a large amount of the original work creating the Mach Micro-kernal. Apple took the NeXTStep / OpenStep operating system as the basis for its Mac OS X operating system. Apple ported it to the PowerPC Chip sets, fused it with knowledge gained from Apple's earlier Unix OSes A/UX and MkLinux and then re-synced the userland with FreeBSD 4.x (now they sync the userland to FreeBSD 5.x).
This might need more explaining. Unlike Linux where all each distribution has the same Linix kernal (sometimes compiled in different ways, but still the same kernal code), BSD branches do NOT have the same kernal. NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD and Darwin(Mac OS X) are each different kernal code bases. Sometimes they share components / code, but mostly they do not. The different branches are designed to provide the same working userland to users and applications. By "re-synced the userland to FreeBSD" Apple did little more then confirm their OS is compatible with FreeBSD and either updated their own /bin and/usr/bin applications to feature / function compatibility with FreeBSD or ported the FreeBSD apps over, whichever made the most sense. Again all work was done by Apple Engineers.
So what Apple did was not "take somebody else's work and lock it down" but rather take the work Apple Engineers and the Engineers of a second company Apple bought (and retained the employees of) and release the code for no cost onto the internet.
OpenDarwin.org
While this is certainly valid given the license of FreeBSD, strictly speaking that's just being a thief as far as I'm concerned.(Yes I know MS has done this too with it's Unix Services layer).
If someone gives something to you for free, it is not stealing. The only people who are allowed a moral objection to how you use the freely given object are the ones who gave it to you. Far from being upset at it, BSD users "shouted for joy" that Apple choose to base their new OS on BSD. Daemon News: Apple -- What's in it for BSD?
I also understand however, that Apple has given some changes back to the KDE community for the web browser, locking up other changes however behind a proprietary license. In other words it looks to me like Apple is trying to garner some favor while stealing the "open source" community blind.
Every single piece of OpenSource software Apple has used (irrespective of the license it was released under and the requirement, or NOT, to release the code) they have release the code to. The code is available either through the Darwin OS , one of the other Apple Open Source Projects, or by giving the code back to the original developers. In addition to that Apple has also released code that was never before opensource, with projects such as OpenPlay , Darwin Streaming Server and
I have never been more enraged at a computer in my life.
Just as some background I am your target customer. I own an iPod and have purchased multiple CD's online from both the Apple iTunes Music Store and buymusic.com. I am the person you want out there yelling from the rooftops how great your product is. You're going to hear quite the opposite.
I bought into the hype from various press outlets about Real offering $.49 track downloads and $4.99 CD's. I visited your site and searched your media catalog without downloading your software. I was very impressed by the quantity of artists in your catalog. It seemed too good to be true. Mom told me what to expect when I had that feeling, but, like an idiot, I ignored mom yet again.
First, I downloaded your software. The installation can, at best, be considered painful. Two reboots! C'mon! I am doing this at work! I am supposed to put all my important projects on hold while I reboot twice just so I can start my computer again to give you money. Ridiculous. The worst part is I knew Real was likely sinking their greedy hooks deep into my system with evil DRM type underpinnings. But, once again, I ignored mom's advice to stop before I was "too deep" and continued down the path of Real evil.
So I decided to purchase a Godsmack album. $4.99. I created my Music Store account and paid for my purchase. I was pretty excited as I saw the file sizes were relatively large (as opposed to buymusic.com which obviously have fairly low bitrates). The files came down quickly from your servers.
I excitedly went to burn my CD to a CD-R. Bzzzz! No rights! No freaking rights! Yes, I am sure that is buried deep within some subclause of some clause of some crappy contract I "OK" clicked my way through, but holy cow. I cannot wait to tell the world that today, in 2004, you actually pay Real.com honest money to honestly purchase a music track and support an artist and you are rewarded with idiotic DRM that doesn't allow you to burn the tracks to a real CD. That's funny, I thought I bought a CD! Wrong!
This seriously chapped my behind and I heard my mother laughing in the back of my head. She knew how this was going to turn out, and my mother can't even turn on a computer. But she has more common sense than me and she would have steered far clear of your unReal offering.
So, continuing on, I was mightily frosted and began investigating ways to rip the tracks even with your DRM hooks clawed maniacally into my machine. (Hey, let's be realists, people are going to get the music onto CD whether you like it or not, if they are motivated. And since I was at work I figured I was doing it for the sake of science and whatnot.) I set out to play the tracks to listen to the quality, figuring I would work out a way to capture the audio stream to a WAV file and compressing it into an MP3 later. With just the Real Player running on my computer, I started playing Track #1.
My computer instantaneously shut down.
My mom is having hysterical fits of laughter at my expense by this point. Reminder to self: send mom flowers for all her great advice. She was so right.
So, there goes a few hours of work that I didn't save. Silly me I thought I was just playing a music track. I didn't realize I was connecting to the WHOPR and trying to play Global Thermonuclear War.
So I had enough hate boiled up inside of me to last the rest of the day and didn't attempt to use your crappy player again.
So, I arrive again this morn and figured I would take on "the challenge". I loaded the fugly Real Player and clicked on "Purchased Music". I selected all 11 tracks from the Godsmack album and clicked "Play Selections". I held my breath and closed my eyes and imagined a whole group of mothers laughing at me all chanting: "What do you think you are doing! You know it isn't going to work you fool!" What? It didn't crash! Yippie! Strike up the band. Oh wait... I have to login? What? What is this. Oh yes, I have to log in to your freakin site for permissio
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