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Gracenote Defends Its Evolution
In the beginning was a music recognition database called CDDB, and it was good. Now, people accuse Gracenote of stealing its success. CDDB and Gracenote architect Steve Scherf sets the record straight.
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I like the tone of "we did nothing wrong, it was the investors' fault, and besides, all our functionality and data are already available through freedb".
Yeah right, so the community had to duplicate a lot of the work that was "donated" to CDDB, while Gracenote profited from it without giving back. His point that the data before CDDB went commercial can still be downloaded is flawed; we're interested in what happened *after* you took all that hard work that you got for free and started charging for it. Besides, that's not "giving back"; that's "whee, we're making a boatload of money here, but hey, have some leftovers of the WORK YOU DID FOR US which we happened to leave behind!".
That's ok, I think the community did a good-faith effort and look how things turned out. I'd say no hard feelings, but I also don't think CDDB can expect a lot of community support or understanding in the future, pretexts and explanations nonwithstanding.
...is not so much that Gracenote took CDDB and closed it. The REAL issue is that Gracenote's contractual agreements with vendors like Apple (f.e.) preclude Apple (f.e.) from implementing a choice in track databases for iTunes.
You use Gracenote in your software, you're prevented by your license from allowing users to choose freedb.
That's suck turned up to 11.
What good is the original db being available, open, free if no one can realistically use it in the real world?
Wired: You built your business upon data donated in good faith by your users.
Steve: blah opnion blah done before Ti Kan blah.
Wired: To charge them for the data that they sent in? Doesn't that seem wrong?
Steve: blah blah investors market blah FreeDB still exists..
Wired: But you forced the community to produce FreeDB as a last-ditch resort. It was a needless duplication of a huge amount of work.
Steve: blah not greed blah GPL blah blah.
I read that whole smarmy article hoping that we'd finally get a decent answer. No dice. It's just a bunch of wandering by a guy who has gone to the McNamara school of interviewing ("don't answer the question you were asked, answer the question you wish you were asked"). But it's easy enough to counter this trick: just keep asking the question that you want answered.
Wired, you let him off the hook easy.
follow the links or
http://download.wikimedia.org/
The very content they'd lock up under fees is currently downloadable so if what you "propose" happens then things boil down to two questions: who's got the latest dump and who's gonna host it? It's all GFDL (ignore the whole image/fair use thing) so there's nothing legally there for wikimedia foundation to stop this from happening. Heck, places like answers.com already take the dumps and use them.
:wq
In 1995-1996 I was running a popular web site I set up called The CDPLAYER.INI Project.
It worked with the Windows CD Player / Media Player application which identified CDs as long as the tracks and titles were in an INI file in your WINDOWS folder.
People would e-mail in their albums as text snippets and I would add them to the INI which users could download. There would be a new version practically every day.
It hit the buffers when the file got to 64K, which was the maximum size of an INI file in Windows 95 - then it had to start being partitioned and the need for a custom application became apparent.....
I have no problem with them using the info that I contributed for their own cause. I have no problem with people selling linux, or the wikipedia on a DVD. My problem is that they do not make the public part of their database - the part that was contributed by 1000s of users - freely available to the public. The fact that they only stole 5 minutes of my time doesn't make it any less of a theft.
If they had announced ahead of time "please contribute to our database, and eventually we will change the access rights so that only qualified clients can access the database.", I am not sure that I and other people would have contributed our time (i.e. money) to them. (and I mean client in the sense of computer program, not customer).