VLC 1.1 Forced To Drop Shoutcast Due To AOL Anti-OSS Provision 315
The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H : The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.
Wait... (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't VLC already come with DeCSS inside to decode DVD video? Isn't DeCSS "illegal software" ? ... so why does that make this module any different? Can't they just ignore the injunction and keep going?
Promise I'm not trolling, just confused, or perhaps not understanding the situation.
Re: iPhone (Score:5, Interesting)
As an iPhone developer, I can tell you the majority of streaming radio apps on mobile phones are listening to Shoutcast servers. That's where most of the money lies for AOL/Nullsoft in Shoutcast. The protocol is very simple and similar to HTTP so the iPhone OS supports it (sort of) out of the box, and some of the more advanced features (like in-stream song names) can be taken advantage of by manipulating the HTTP headers.
Don't use terms you don't understand (Score:2, Interesting)
You didn't get 'several email injunctions from AOL employees'. A judge puts an injunction into place. AOL asked you to stop. It may have lead to an injunction at some point had you told them to piss off, but you complied, and thats where it ended.
The 'license issue' you quoted also basically says 'if your software license imposes restrictions that are anti-closed source software, then we don't want to play with you.' This is pretty much identical to the point of GPL but in the other direction. Same stupid constraint, you're just pointing it out like you license is different than there. Same rule, just used by the other side. Get used to it, they are just doing to you what you want to do to them, you have nothing to bitch about here.
The toolbar bundling issue is just another retarded constraint, but GPL (in my opinion) is full of retarded constraints that make it less than open by my definition. I wouldn't do it either if it were me, but thats what happens when you want to use someone elses stuff, you have to play nice with them.
Yes, I'm going to be marked as a troll, but really this is just as much a GPL being anti-closed source as it is AOL being anti-open source. Both sides are doing the same retarded thing, using a license the other one doesn't like and then blaming it on the other person.
Burn in hell (Score:5, Interesting)
I've operated a media distribution system (mostly video ppv) for about a decade. About 7 years ago, I ended up blocking the AOL browser completely. It was a worthless piece of shit that caused 50% of our customer service issues. Coupled with their idiotic "no refresh for 30 days" DNS servers (which means any time you moved a website to a new IP, it "vanished" for a month for all AOLosers) and their proxy servers that made tracking large-scale credit card fraud extremely difficult, it literally cost us money to even have AOLosers in the customer base. I was in the process of compiling a list of AOL IP ranges and had plans to block them completely when they finally rolled over and died in the dial-up market. Almost overnight, they became 99% irrelevant and my life got so much easier, I was able to start taking regular vacations.
In summation, GO TO HELL, AOL! You're nothing but a festering boil on the ass of the internet and your rotting corpse needs to be dumped into an active volcano.
Re:Not the first and not the last (Score:2, Interesting)
In their defense, AOL is still an okay company. They aren't as big as they used to be in the 90s, but then neither is Sega and I still like them.
- I used AOL back in the 80s when they were called Quantum Link. It was the only service that provided full-color graphics, like a primitive website: http://toastytech.com/guis/c64gquantumlink.gif [toastytech.com]
- http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/files/Habitat%20scene.gif [pbs.org]
- I continued using them for my first ISP to serve web pages to my Commodore Amiga.
- I dropped them after the whole "busy signal" debacle.
- But then went back to them when they provided Accelerated Dialup under the name "netscape isp". It's great for travel, or backup when the Broadband fails, and only costs $7.
So basically I've been a customer of theirs, minus a brief break, for nearly 25 years.
Re:Not the first and not the last (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate to interrupt a good old-fashioned witch-hunt, but AOL was instrumental in the creation of a little group called the Mozilla Foundation, transferring hardware and intellectual property to them and donating $2 million.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#History [wikipedia.org]
So maybe they're not all bad.
Re:AO-who? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, they did release AOLserver. From wikipedia:
Re:Not the first and not the last (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree, yet by the time they bought them, Netscape was a sad shell of company that didn't know it was dead yet. Nobody was going to Netscape.com by that time, and AOL tried to integrate as much of the My Netscape product into the failed My AOL product and actually brought My AOL back from the dead on iPlanet server. Traffic kept dropping over at Netscape.com and they finally put it out of its misery and redirected people to a somewhat revitalized My AOL product with the "Netscape" brand "chrome" on it. After all this, My AOL features were blended with AOL.COM and it survived to some success over the years. Today you go to my.netscape.com and it is my.aol.com with a Netscape "skin" running on a combination of Apache and AOLserver servers, the latter being an open-source project since 1999. -another ex-AOL employee.
Re:Not the first and not the last (Score:5, Interesting)
The license agreement in question is a service license, not a software license.
As long as the VLC developers don't use the service, thy cannot be held to any service license.
As such, even though this is 100% free of Nullsoft code, it conforms to Nullsoft's specifications (as if it didn't, it would be unable to interact with the SHOUTcast Directory server), and is thus supposedly covered under the SHOUTcast Directory Service License, as the software uses the service.
This of course is a complete and utter overreach on the part of AOL. If such an interpretation of the law had a chance in hell of prevailing in court, Microsoft would have put an end to WINE years ago.
Just another case of a large corporation abusing copyright law to bully small developers.