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AOL Open Sourcing Audio & Video Technology

Posted by Zonk on from the giving-back-to-america dept.

daria24 writes "BetaNews says that AOL is open sourcing Winamp AVS and Milkdrop, two popular Winamp plug-ins, and its Ultravox streaming media platform (the successor to Shoutcast). 'Despite helping to launch the Mozilla Foundation and releasing the code to its AOL Server software, America Online has never been synonymous with open source. But a number of new initiatives could change AOL's proprietary image, as the company strives to reach a broader audience on the open Web.' The next-generation AIM release will also be an open platform, which AOL says 'could rival even Mozilla due to its scale and the massive AIM user base.'"

6 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. CONFTROLL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    267210
    513880

  2. Re:You BASTARDS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Yes but like Java, Javascript surely uses a garbage collection concept meaning it is the browsers responsibility to free memory, and any leaks are thus due to the browser.

  3. Re:AOL does contribute to open source software by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Without being too familar with Javascript I am reasonably sure Javascript uses Memory too like any other programming language on the planet.

  4. Re:You BASTARDS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Don't be an @$$. Remember how annoying it was when people said that sites only displayed right in IE 5.5 or "better"? Yeah, you do. Did that get you to use IE? No, it didn't, unless it was your bank or something. So guess what? 90% of people won't go to your non-IE site. Period.

  5. Re:You BASTARDS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    but during the browser wars wasn't it IE producing functionality that hadn't even been drafted by the W3C yet?

    Yes, and that was the whole damn problem.

    The point of HTML was universal interoperability (so Tim Berners-Lee's collegues could all read each other's stuff no matter what computer setup they had). But Microsoft sacrificed this in order to obtain control and market share. They encouraged web developers to use their proprietary markup, which forced people into using their browser if they wanted to access this content.

    This was not a benevolent gesture from Microsoft- it was nothing but a power-grab. Open, agreed-upon standards are the foundation of interoperability, and Microsoft always stands against this when it thinks it can monopolize a technology./p

  6. Minutes unti... by Kihaji · · Score: 0, Troll
    RMS whines that this is not good enough...

    5, 4, 3, 2...