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Gracenote Defends Its Evolution

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the well-straighter-anyway dept.

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.

1 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. What's there to set straight? by Roadmaster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.