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Spotify Releases a Linux-Only Client Library

Posted by timothy on from the you-and-you-and-definitely-not-you dept.

f0rk writes "Spotify, a popular music streaming service, has just recently released libspotify. An official, binary-only, only for subscribers, library to 'enable and inspire you to build some really cool stuff.' The first release only has support for x86-32 Linux, the only major platform Spotify does not run on. It looks like the Spotify team is trying to be nice to the Linux community and hope someone will use their restricted binary-only library to write a Linux client."

7 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Perfect editorial! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Spotify, a popular music streaming service, has just recently released libspotify. An official, binary-only, only for subscribers, library to 'enable and inspire you to build some really cool stuff.' The first release only have support for x86-32 Linux, the only major platform Spotify do not run on. It looks like the Spotify team is trying to be nice to the Linux community and hope some one will use there restricted binary-only library to write a Linux client."

    Wow, that are some insanely tight proofreading they're, editors.

  2. wine? by meow27 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So to run this in windows I'm gonna have to use Wine on windows? Thats just massed up

    1. Re:wine? by Nazlfrag · · Score: 4, Insightful

      From their help page:

      On what platforms can I use Spotify?
              Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Windows XP or later. You can also run Spotify in Wine on Linux.

      So it looks like you can already run it in windows on Wine. Seriously though, at least they seem to be catering to us 1%, more than what most do. We should be thanking them for this token effort, keep applying pressure to open it sure but at least they bothered to test on wine and make a blob.

  3. Slashvertisement by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yup, I've never heard of Spotify and I can't imagine why I'd be interested in this. But hey, I always love it with people release "binary only" libraries. They typically provide a nice big fat header file and a .so file. Sometimes they even strip the .so file, that's what I like to call "a challenge". Today I am not sufficiently bored to reverse engineer this crap, but I'm sure someone, who knows what Spotify is and actually gives a shit, will be. How hard something is to reverse engineer is determined by three things:

    1) Armoring
    2) Symbols
    3) Relocation information

    When it comes to Linux stuff, no-one ever does armoring, so we might as well not even think about that. All the interesting symbols for this library have come from the header file.. but ELF binaries leak lots of symbols, even when you strip them, so yeah, no problem there. Finally, relocation information, makes the so called "hard problem" of reverse engineering, separating code from data, pretty easy.. and .so files require you to provide them.

    So I don't know why they bother. If there's secrets you're trying to hide from developers by not giving out source code, you're just failing.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  4. Despotify by lixee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why would anyone use their geo-restricted binaries when open-source Despotify is out there?

    --
    Res publica non dominetur
    1. Re:Despotify by xkcd150 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think this is Spotify's response to Despotify.

      When Despotify was released, they had a full office going "f*ck, our business is screwed".

      They could have gone the route of lawyers and trying to silence or stopping the project, but instead they just fixed the security issues that came up, and let the open source project be for a while.

      And now they release this. They're trying to reach out to the open source community, but their hands are tied because of where their money's coming from.

      Same reasons they have to put geographic restrictions on the music in the first place.

  5. x86-only by ManiaX+Killerian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is getting bloody ridiculous. Everyone releases a piece of binary crap for 32bit linux and that's - OK, are you saying your code is so crappy you can't recompile it at least for x86_64 (which is starting to get comparable in size to the ix86 crowd). Heck, our stuff (which is about 300MB of source) got recompiled for x86_64 in 6 hours (took two-three compilations and some tweaking, the diff was less than 30k).

    So, please, people that release binary stuff for Linux, etc., take a bit of time, compile for something else, or you'll start looking really bad.