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.

Comments

What's there to set straight?

[Roadmaster]

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.

Why did people submit data to cddb?

[leehwtsohg]

I submitted data to cddb. Why did I do it? Why take the time to type in the tracks?

Because I thought that I am submitting my data to the public. I thought that if I submit my data, so will others, and we'll have a public resource that everybody can use. But suddenly, that public resource turned private - I could not use it freely as before. They tricked me into giving them a resource, and then treated it as if it is their own property.
It is as if I gave a dollar to a public project - say a server to run slashdot on, thinking that if everybody contributed a dollar to that resource, then the public will have a resource - slashdot will have a fast server. And then slashdot suddenly turned around, took the $100k that people contributed, added another $100k from their own money, and said that now you can only access slashdot under certain conditions.
It is true that what they did was legal, but I think it was highly unethical. They for sure tricked me out of 5 minutes of my time.

Re:Why did people submit data to cddb?

[Rob T Firefly]

Exactly. It's comparable to Wikipedia and other public knowledge infodumps. In the case of Wikipedia, the whole thing is run by a nonprofit foundation with all its policies, including all the legal terms you're releasing your contributions under, out in the open for all to see. It's a pretty safe bet that the Wikimedia foundation won't all of a sudden charge mandatory access fees and get rich off of what its users have spent years building up in good faith.

Re:Why did people submit data to cddb?

[Quaryon]

I don't know how it works now, but if I recall correctly the big change that happened when CDDB became Gracenote was that they started insisting on a fee to be paid by application developers wishing to write code that would connect to their database. You would need some kind of unique developer key to connect, which cost money. This immediately meant that all the open source software that was previously able to use CDDB was suddenly without an information source for some of their functionality. It took some time for freedb to be set up with servers that could handle the required load, and for all the end-user application software to be able to redirect to those servers. This is the fundamental reason why a lot of people got very upset with Gracenote, because there was a time when all the information freely submitted to CDDB was unusable, as none of the pieces of OSS that people were using were able to access the data.

So, you may not pay money yourself, but that doesn't mean that money is not changing hands in order for you to be able to use that feature.

Q.