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Streaming Server for Linux
Apple has released the source to their Open Source Streaming Server. It now supports Linux in addition
to MacOS X, which can only help Linux in the server market. The software
has been released under the APSL, and can support 2000 connections on a(n admittedly loaded) G3. Does
anyone know if Apple is working on modifying the APSL to meet the concerns about the revocation
clause expressed by many people in the free software community?
Power Computing. It was competition. So it was removed.
Didn't the clonemakers overstep the bounds of the licensing agreements?
Quicktime. It once was just a nice free client. Now it's got a 'Pro' edition. Plus the fact that Apple is gripping the codecs like they're made of pure gold.
Does Apple own all the codecs, or are other companies also guilty of hoarding them? My guess is that Apple's hands are, to some extent, tied.
Whatever. I, too, am pissed at the lack of a client and at the miniscule possibility of running BeOS on some fancy (hypothetical for now) quad-G4 box. I can't do a thing about the latter, but what can we, The Big Bad Linux Community, do about the former? Wasn't there a petition a while back about getting a QuickTime client?
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=8^
The clone situation isn't quite as simple as the clone vendors whined about. All of the clone vendors were making use of Apple motherboard designs and ROMs for a ridiculously cheap fee, on the order of 50 bucks or so a pop. Essentially Apple was paying the clone makers to tighten a noose around its neck. The main clone makers (PowerComputing and Daystar) were supposed to increase the market share in areas where Apple knew it was weak: Entry level computing (PowerComputing) and multiprocessor systems (Daystar). Instead all the vendors went after the same slice of the pie as Apple was after, so as a result while there was more competition the market share didn't actually increase.
Since Apple makes its money from hardware this was a win for the clone vendors at the expense of a loss for Apple. It was also a short term win for the consumers for at least in the short term they'd get faster and cheaper computers, in the long term I doubt very much Apple would be around.
Around this time Steve Jobs entered the scene and looked at the licensing situation and realized Apple was doing itself in. Negotiations were done with the main companies and at least one of the companies leaked the negotiations to the press. Graduated licensing: compete in new markets and its cheap, cut out Apple's legs and its going to be prohibitively expensive for you. PowerComputing didn't feel it could compete in this manner and refused to sign. Eventually all negotiations were cut off.
PowerComputing probably underestimated the value of the low end market. Had they signed the new agreement when it was offered they could have introduced their version of the iMac and a few years earlier (and it would probably have had a floppy) and made a lot of money. The most unfair thing Apple did was terminate the license agreements early for at least one vendor.
Everybody wants into the streaming media business, Apple is no exception, neither is Microsoft. Does anybody remember a couple a months ago when the CEO of RealMedia was screaming bloody murder because MS signed a bunch of agreements with them, and then *bundled* it's own player into IE50?
That tells you how serious the big players are about this market. Both MS and RealMedia want to give away the players for free, and then make bank selling the servers. So it looks like Apple wants to do the opposite: free servers and charge for quicktime, interesting.
I disagree on RTP/RTSP they're workable protocols, certainly better then ATMesque "QoS" (Don't get me started) but it's just that as soon as the big money ID'd this as an important market, all of their "hired-gun" programmers (read:lobbyists) started showing up for all the standards meetings, and screwed everything up. Exact same thing happened to VRML back in the day. The ironic part is that none of the fancy reservation protocols can take the place of just plain old tactic of builing "headspace" into the network.(but i digress...)
The point is that Apple's move is going to throw a wrench in MS's hopes of owning this market. It's going to be hard for anyone to charge for a server, when there is a "Name-Brand" server available for free.
Meanwhile, I'm streaming MP3's, onto my system, as I type, and they sound great. Even without anyone's big fancy server or reservation protocol.
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. -Brian Kernigan
I tend to agree. I suspect that Be, as a small company, really only had the resources to do (and support) an Intel port OR a G3 port, not both. The Intel market is about a hundred times more viable, so they made a wise choice in choosing it, but didn't want to piss off their old PPC customers, so they made a big deal out of Apple not releasing the specs to them, to make Apple the bad guy. All the while, they probably were planning on phasing out PPC support anyway; Apple just gave them a convenient scapegoat.
As others have pointed out, there are many pieces of hardware that have Linux and *BSD support without having a single spec to work with. It can be done, it's just costly in terms of time, which Be couldn't spare.
The codec does not belong to Apple. The license it from Sorenson. If you want to, you can call up Sorenson and license it too. Go for it. As to "buy it out and pretend it's free", that's Microsoft's strategy. Apple didn't buy Quicktime, it invented it. Apple did buy NeXT, but there was no streaming server in NeXT.
Unfortunately Sorenson will not allow their codec to be licensed or ported for an OS in which Apple has not made available a QuickTime client. This includes Linux.
I found this hard to believe but Norman Doyle normd@s-vision.com, director of software development at Sorenson confirmed it on the public QuickTime-Talk list (QuickTime-Talk Digest V1 #138, June 15 1999), http://www.lists.apple.com/quicktime -talk.html.
Quoting Norman:
Apple and Sorenson Vision currently have a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch your back" relationship. It's beneficial for both companies but also to many of you. We are very supportive of QuickTime and will only port our codec to those systems that are supported by QuickTime
For more background on this see Mark Podlipec's comments on his attempts to get the sorenson codec ported to Xamim http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/
Apple seems completely uniterested in allowing QuickTime to be ported to Linux or other free nixes. Charles Wiltgen the QuickTime Technology Manager cwiltgen@apple.com is seemingly completely unconvinced of any benefit to Apple of allowing a QuickTime client on Linux. His standard response to the question about a Linux client on the quicktime-talk list is quoted below:
Linux is a fine topic for this list if it involves serving
QuickTime movies. Otherwise, it's not.
If QuickTime on other platforms is critical to you, let your
platform vendor know that you need them to license QuickTime --
refer them to me, and I'll hook them up with the the Apple people
they'll need to talk to.
If you have more thoughts on the subject, please take it to a
different forum, or email me privately.
See: QuickTime-Talk Digest V1 #133, June 12 1999
If you've got a well reasoned response about why it is in Apple's interest to make or allow a QuickTime client for Linux please write to Charles. I'd base it on Linux desktops eating away MS share instead of Apple's.
-stephen
The codec does not belong to Apple. The license it from Sorenson. If you want to, you can call up Sorenson and license it too. Go for it. As to "buy it out and pretend it's free", that's Microsoft's strategy. Apple didn't buy Quicktime, it invented it. Apple did buy NeXT, but there was no streaming server in NeXT.
Power Computing. It was competition. So it was removed.
No, it was a mistake on Apple's part, so it was corrected. Apple still generates most of it's profit in hardware. Power Computing was licensed to sell MacOS-based systems, and they were not playing by the rules. If Apple had not ended cloning, all the clones and Apple too would have gone out of business.
PPCLinux. It didn't suit Apple. So specs were withheld. Same with BeOS (sorta.. Be is a diff case)
That's a BS lie passed areound by Be Inc. so that they can only develop new stuff for Intel. LinuxPPC runs on every Mac Apple sells, including the B&W G3s and the iMac. Why can LinuxPPC do it and Be can't, especially when the LinuxPPC source code is open-source? Sounds to me like Be is at fault here.
Quicktime. It once was just a nice free client. Now it's got a 'Pro' edition. Plus the fact that Apple is gripping the codecs like they're made of pure gold.
There is still a free Quicktime client. You're faulting Apple because they want to make money? How dare they, you say! Apple is a company, and their goal is to make money. Next you're going to be upset because they won't give you a G3 for free!
Then there are the legalese issues on the ASPL. I'm no lawyer so I can't touch on them. But I hope they're reviewed and fixed.
Apple revised their open-source license, and most people in the OSS community are happy with th new form of it.
Plus, whatever happened to that issue with OSX/Apache crashing..?
Well, if you followed Apple news, you'd know that this has been fixed in the Mac OSX Developer Preview 1 (see MacOSRumors from the other day for info on DP1, it sounds awesome).
Anyway.. I just have to say that Apple is really annoying me. I thought underdogs were the friendlier ones? But Apple doesn't seem to think so. Their playing monopoly with only a few of the cheaper streets and some houses. MS at least can't DO anything monopolistic right now, the DOJ is all over them.
Monopoly? Why, because they open-sourced their next generation OS (Darwin) and a high-performance RTP/RTSP server? Sounds pretty consumer/user friendly to me!
Well there's my ramble for the night/morning. As nice as Apple is being with the limited amount of Open Sourcing they're doing, they still aren't quite coming off friendly. How would we react if MS opened a small part of a program to Open Source and kept everything else under raps, including continued monopoly plays? Food for thought.
If they open-sourced the whole thing, they'd go out of business. They are open-sourcing more things than you hear about though. What about OpenPlay? Thanks to that, OpenPlay will exist on linux (being ported by Loki now for use in Myth II), and we'll have a cross-platform (Mac, Windows, and UNIX/Linux) network gaming transport layer that's free for everyone. That's a good contribution from Apple you don't hear about often.
Cut Apple some slack. They're still the best thing going in the commercial realm, and OSX is gonna rock.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Well, the truth is that no one is making big money with streaming media except content providers and bandwidth providers. I work for the biggest US news organization on the net, and streaming video is great for us. It turns out that clickthrough rates on video ads are 20x as high as on static banner ads. So we can sell a video ad for more money.
As to selling servers, the onl people who actually buy them are small sites like porn sites and smaller news orgs. The largest companies are actually paid by Real and Microsoft to broadcast in their format. Ever wondered why CNN only archives video in NetShow format? They paid for the priveledge.
I wish I could say more, but I don't know what's public information and what is private, so I'll keep my mouth shut. Suffice it to say that right now, marketshare is Apple's biggest goal. There was not a good, free streaming server to run on all those gazillions of Linux boxes out there, so Apple is providing one in hopes of becoming the de-facto standard. It's a good plan IMHO. BTW, everyone go download the Apple Streaming Server 1.1 -- it compiles on Linux on Intel! Now, if only I can get it to work on LinuxPPC!
- Vincit qui patitur.
Actually, no. In 1.1 they properly defined "covered code" and "larger work", and loosened the requirement to send updates to their site (so that the license isn't invalidated if their site goes down).
There is still vague language in the termination clause that can cause the entire license to be terminated if there is a legal dispute. The license to all of the code - not just the part being disputed. All of the license - not just saying that you can't distribute it.
IMO, this needs to be fixed.
Because Linux can get away with partial support for a long time.
If a Linux distribution works on some but not all G3-based systems, Linux advocates will download it or buy it anyways. If it works, great. If their system is a variant that isn't yet supported, well, they haven't lost that much. Sooner or later the hardware specs are reverse-engineered and it works. By that time, Apple has introduced another hardware variant, and the cycle continues.
BeOS caters to a different audience. They aren't people who like being into cutting-edge software development - they're working on other things (various types of art and other media-related work). They want to put in the CD and watch it go. They aren't going to pay money for a CD that might or might not work on their system.
Linux can afford to come out with incremental patches that support progressively more systems, because that's the way Linux works and what users are used to. Be can't. They make a single, polished release, and possibly a maintainence release a few months down the road. That's it. Those have to support all hardware until the next major release comes out.
With Apple not giving out specs and possibly changing specs at whim to foil reverse-engineering, Be can't guarantee that their releases will work. So, they can't sell for G3-based systems.
If the specs were given, it actually wouldn't take that much more work to support both platforms. BeOS was originally written with that in mind, and so were most of the drivers under BeOS. But, Apple isn't cooperating and Intel is, so Apple support is shelved.
That's a BS lie passed areound by Be Inc. so that they can only develop new stuff for Intel. LinuxPPC runs on every Mac Apple sells, including the B&W G3s and the iMac. Why can LinuxPPC do it and Be can't, especially when the LinuxPPC source code is open-source?
Click on "user info" above and see my previous response.
If Linux doesn't work on a particular G3 system, the user thinks "Oh well, we haven't reverse-engineered this one yet. I'll wait for the next patch.".
If BeOS doesn't work on a particular G3 system, the user thinks "This CD that I paid for doesn't work. BeOS sucks.".
Be _has_ to be able to guarantee that its OS will work on all or nearly all systems - and will continue to work without modification until the next major revision is released. Without Apple's cooperation, they can't do that.
See the problem with the Linux model of "get the software for free... pay for support" means that there is no incentive to make the software better... more intuitive... simpler.... easier, because it is in the "support peoples" interest to keep it all confusing and complicated.
/. readers would have a job in a Linux support position it linux was as easy to use/understand/configure/maintain as the mac???
Answer me this...
How many
answer.... probably not many. Hence the fact that it is not very profitable being in the Macintosh support area. I speek from a position of authority here because I have been doing Mac support for about 6 years now and I can tell you... if I had been doing Winblows or Binux support I would be a wealthy man.
CASE POINT : Tim O'reily. Do you think he really wants Linux to be really easy and simple.
Short Answer.... NO.
By the way? How much do the guys at RedHat expect to make when they go public??? 20 million... 200 million?
Not bad for using other peoples hard work.
Basically... Stop baggin commercial companies cause for free software to exist... there has to be commercial companies. Even LINUS himself has admitted this. He even WORKs for a commercial company to put food on the table. Free software does not do this.
Just for clarification, Apple doesn't own the Sorenson codec. Apple is licensing it, and the terms of the contract are that the company is not allowed to license it to anyone else.
Linux is becomming comercial. Deal with it. P.S. Welcome to the real world.
What is it with this attitude? Why is that so many people think the "real world" is an excuse to exploit and to expect it from others?
Let me tell you about the "real world". In the real world, Apple has little credibility with the Linux community. If they want us to take them seriously, they'll play by our rules.
Quite the contrary, UDP is very useful still. With multimedia you don't need to guarentee that all the packets get to the destination, just that the packets are only used in the correct sequence. You drop packets that arrive late. With standard TCP net congestion can really kill your stream due to all the retries to make sure everything gets where it's going.
;-) There are already a few existing servers, do a few searches on freshmeat. However, something that Apple wants to include in their flagship server software should be carefully looked at too.
This isn't always the best, for example, if you require everything gets to the destination. Even then, though, if you have a generously sized buffer, you can store packets and request for a missed one, thus potentionally saving time on retransmits. This can be useful in pausing a stream temporarily as well.
This makes UDP very good to use for real-time streaming. Besides, any contribution to open source should be welcomed... if you don't like the contribution, just don't use it!