Clean-Room RTMPE Spec Created From rtmpdump
lkcl writes "A clean-room RTMPE specification has been created using the source code of rtmpdump-v1.6 for guidance. Adobe recently issued a DMCA take-down notice against SourceForge, resulting in copies of rtmpdump hitting quite a few bittorrent sites worldwide."
Quite.
IANAL, etc. but my distinct impression was that cleanrooming wouldn't(outside of curious edge cases) save you from the DMCA. For copyright claims, the more layers of cleanroom, the better; but the DMCA only cares if the code constitutes a circumvention device or not. It could be based on a cracked copy of some proprietary adobe tool, OSS based on network sniffing of the proprietary tool, written according to a spec based on the OSS implementation, or, for that matter, produced by the Oracle of Delphi based on instructions from Olympus.
If you're going to post an article about some obscure bullshit nobody's ever heard of, you could at least give people some hint at WTF you're talking about. "RTMPE" doesn't even show up on Wikipedia. God forbid you elaborate your terse, two sentence summary.
The developer of the clean implementation does not see one byte of the original code, onnly the reversed specs. This is how the original IBM BIOS was cleaned, allowing the PC explosion.
OK WTF is that all about...
RTMP is the Real Time Messaging Protocol that Adobe has developed for streaming stuff over the Internet.
Red5 is a Free Software (LGPL) implementation of the RTMP.
Cygnal is the Gnash project's RTMP server (also Free Software).
Also see more docs on RTMP on the Gnash wiki, and RTMPE on this other wiki.
... and should I care?
Would you like to have control over the software that you run and use? Are you concerned about your software and/or hardware implementing things like the Broadcast Flag? Do you believe in Free Software because it gives you control over your computer?
If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, then you probably should care, as what's going on right now is making it difficult or impossible for you to run Free Software (or even to pick software) to interact with the RTMP protocol -- a protocol that a given website might require you to use to interact with their media content.
coding is life
That's not what my mom told me a "clean room" meant.