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Netflix Touts Open Source, Ignores Linux
Julie188 writes "If Netflix loves open source, where's the Linux client? Last week's post from Netflix on its use of open source has gotten a lot of coverage from the tech press. Too bad nobody's called the video giant out on its hypocrisy: They benefit greatly from open source, but really don't care to let their customers do the same."
From the Netflix website:
"The great thing about a good open source project that solves a shared challenge is that it develops it's own momentum and it is sustained for a long time by a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. At Netflix we jumped on for the ride a long time ago and we have benefited enormously from the virtuous cycles of actively evolving open source projects. We benefit from the continuous improvements provided by the community of contributors outside of Netflix. We also benefit by contributing back the changes we make to the projects. By sharing our bug fixes and new features back out into the community, the community then in turn continues to improve upon bug fixes and new features that originated at Netflix and then we complete the cycle by bring those improvements back into Netflix."
"Here is an incomplete sampling of the projects we utilize, we have contributed back to most of them: Hudson, Hadoop, Hive, Honu, Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Ivy, Cassandra, HBase, etc, etc."
http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-use-and-contribute-to-open.html
They are mooching.
They have taken from the commons and aren't giving back.
Wrong. They contribute to the projects they use.
"Here is an incomplete sampling of the projects we utilize, we have contributed back to most of them: Hudson, Hadoop, Hive, Honu, Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Ivy, Cassandra, HBase, etc, etc."
http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-use-and-contribute-to-open.html
The Netflix streams are all have proprietary DRM protection. To write our own client we would have to reverse engineer this proprietary protocol (which is legal, but can be difficult), and then worse, we would have hack the authorized players, and to get the DRM keys out of them. This implementation would constitute a circumvention device, and using or distributing it would be illegal under the DMCA.
Asking open source customers to break the law to use your service isn't exactly friendly to open source.
Dude, if they had actually released the source code to their client, someone would have already ported it to Linux (heck, I would do it nobody else stepped up). Netflix uses open source tools in the course of doing business. That is very different than actually releasing their product as open source.
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