Songbird, the open source media player, is now being embedded in Philips’ GoGear line.
This is a win-win.
Open source projects like Songbird often have a hard time being noticed by the general market, but now it will have the power of Philips behind it. Philips also has a business model that Songbird can take advantage of, not just in the hardware but through its existing site.
Philips, meanwhile, gets an excellent player that is far more competitive with iTunes than anything it previously offered.
This is the way open source is supposed to work. It’s supposed to connect with the market. If you don’t want your hands stained with filthy lucre you’re FOSS, not open source.
Songbird recently released Version 1.4.3 of its software. The new version has a warning against using it with Windows 7, but Stephen Lau writes that’s just a “caveat emptor” thing, that he knows of many users already running Songbird on Windows 7.
In the same post he notes that Songbird is no longer maintaining an iPod Extension, preferring to go with an import-export syncing function instead. “Playing an unsupported game of catchup with Apple sucked,” he writes.
On the Philips side, support is being rolled out slowly. Some new GoGear players will include Songbird inside. Others will have a support CD provided.
Filed under: OS Updates, Windows, Microsoft
I don’t like reporting news without exact numbers, especially when making claims like this, but the Director of Marketing at Microsoft is fairly confident about this one: “Windows 7 is by far the fastest selling Operating System in history.”
He doesn’t give the exact number of activated licenses (why not?) but he does cite some rather astronomical PC sales in 2009. PC sales on Black Friday were up 63% over the same period in 2008 — and for the entire holiday period, 2009 saw 50% more PC sales than the year before. Incidentally, the graph at Net Applications show Windows 7 as having a 5.71% share in the operating system market, up from 4% in November.
It’s not particularly surprising, considering Windows is PC sales, but it still would’ve been nice to get some raw figures. In the mean time we’ll just have to rely on data gathered by outside sources like Net Applications. Did you notice that XP is losing users faster than Vista? I suppose that’s the die-hard Windows XP user base finally jumping ship to an operating system worthy of their money.
Windows 7: The fastest selling operating system in history originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Windows XP – Windows 7 – Operating System – Microsoft – Microsoft Windows
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This week at CES, there’s been a number of new e-readers announced, including Hearst Corporation’s Skiff, Spring Design’s Alex, Copia’s slew of e-readers, and Plastic Logic’s Que, as well as <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA671377
Naspter is one of the most recognizable names in digital music, being one of the first music distribution platforms when it was released way back in 1999. After much controversy, and changing hands several times in the last 10 years, it is now owned by the US electronics retailer Best Buy. Now the technology behind Best Buy Remix, the open API for Best Buy’s product catalog, has been released to the public with the Napster Access API (for technical details see our new Napster API profile).
As their API’s press release notes:
The Napster API includes access to all of the Napster music service features, including: a la carte MP3 purchasing (via Web), on-demand streaming of nine million songs, radio stations, user-created playlists and Billboard charts. CE manufacturers can also offer free trial subscriptions to customers.
The API is the result of a decade spent transforming Napster, which has had more than a few run-ins with the legal system in the past. Chris Gorog, the CEO of Napster until recently, made this post in the Napster blog:
We began with a simple idea – “legalizing Napster” – and spent almost a decade trying to perfect that dream.
It wasn’t always easy. We were criticized at times for “renting” music. But we thought then – and still believe quite strongly – that we had a better approach to digital music. Why buy downloads – when for a small monthly fee you can have access to – everything?
Well after a lot of years of chasing this dream of - unlimited access, anytime, anywhere – it seems to be catching on.
Thanks to our customer’s support – Napster now has many hundreds of thousands of music fans that really like “renting” music and this fan base keeps growing every day. Although our customers call it streaming. Streaming from their PC. Streaming from their IP connected TV. And streaming from their smart phones (coming soon!).
Napster Access is targeting any internet capable device including the Napster TV widget for Samsung televisions with the Internet@TV feature, mobile phones, iPods, iPhones, MP3 players and web applications. Access to the service costs a few dollars a month, which gives end users unlimited streaming of music as well as the ability to permanently download a number of MP3s.
There are a number of sample web applications that make use of the Napster Access API, as well as comprehensive documentation for web developers.
As we noted earlier this week, music APIs are popular, and with this latest addition, there are now 68 music-related APIs in our directory.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Filed under: Developer, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Google, Beta, Browsers
If you’re into getting the latest, greatest, most-untested updates to Google’s Chrome Browser, the developer channel is the place for you. New updates to Chrome on all platforms just hit the dev channel, with a bug fix that should solve some problems with HTML5 audio and video. The big news is just for Mac users, though: Chrome Extension support is here!
That means OS X users now can share in the epic winningness of Download Squad’s 10 must-have Chrome extensions, compiled by our own Sebastian, and a collection of 15+ extensions put together by Lee. Or, if you prefer to find extensions on your own, head over to Google’s Chrome Extensions Gallery and start browsing.
This update to Chrome via the dev channel shouldn’t be confused with the latest nightly build of Chromium, which is the open source browser that forms the basis for Chrome. As Nik pointed out, Chromium nightlies for Mac now have Bookmark Manager enabled by default. You can enable bookmark sync in the dev channel release of Chrome Mac, but a known bug crashes the browser on adding a new folder.
[via CNET]
Google Chrome updates its developer build, now with extensions for Mac originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Chrome – Open source – Microsoft Windows – Linux – Mac OS X
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Yesterday’s piece on open source buy-outs drew many strong reactions, but the best may have been a link to a piece Michael Meeks has posted to GNOME on copyright assignment.
(Picture from Wikipedia.)
In yesterday’s piece the tie-dyed t-shirts essentially had a form of copyright assigned to the co-op which was eventually sold to WalMart. In software terms copyright assignment has always been controversial, and as Meeks writes it is going to become more so in the wake of the mySQL buy-out.
If you are writing as an employee of a corporate sponsor, whether that’s Novell or ZDNet, this assignment is not an issue. The rights to your work will follow the Golden Rule — he who has the gold makes the rules.
In the case of a community project it’s more complex. Meeks writes that the reputation of the sponsoring organization matters a lot, and that even the Free Software Foundation had its besmirched by the controversy over GPLv3.
The problem is that things change. He offers the example of Sun trying to monetize Open Office early this decade. The process leading to Oracle’s acquisition of mySQL is another.
Even the Linux user interface split, between KDE and GNOME, which newcomers to the space find impossible to understand, began with copyright assignment. KDE was based on non-free Qt, and while that software eventually went to the LGPLv2 it created a “vast amount of acrimony, duplication and wasteage that continues to this day.”
There are plenty of folks who respond to talkbacks here with disdain for community contributions. But such contributions go deeper than code. Anyone who reports bugs, or checks out beta software, is contributing to a project, even if no copyright assignment is involved.
In the end, Meeks writes, we’re talking about a trust process. Even asking for trust can damage this process, as noted in the research paper The Best of Strangers. Companies that demand copyright assignment attract fewer contributors, but managing a complex copyright regime, with rights held by outsiders, can be a nightmare.
Meeks ends his paper with a list of recommendations that add up to one word — beware. And he ends with a warning:
Civil law is there to help prevent the injustice of having your love and support sold out. A refusal to consider protecting the rights of the weaker party tends to confirm an intent to exploit. This of course applies as equally to trademark as to copyright ownership.
This may be one of the most important papers on open source since The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It is well worth your time to read it in full.
Have you ever put much thought into Internet piracy?
‘Ooh, cool, tons of free stuff!’ – no, I mean, really thought about it.
In almost every Western nation software and music piracy is theft. In the eyes of the law it’s wrong. There’s simply nothing more to it: it’s intellectual property that you’re stealing from the property’s owner. As mere users, just single faces in a crowd of millions, we’re relatively safe. It’s like stealing an apple from a busy market stall: it’s not particularly hard, it’s not very damaging — and at the end of the day, it’s hard to catch a single thief in a crowd of millions.
Organized crime, on the other hand, is serious business. You can think of BitTorrent sites and trackers as organized crime units. In some cases they control the flow of goods from the source all the way to the end user, and sometimes they’re just masters of distribution — either way, it’s these organized units that get most of the heat from governments and groups like the RIAA and MPAA. Conventional wisdom has it that it’s greater ‘value for money’ to shut down the big boys rather than go after run-of-the-mill pirates like you and I (hypothetically speaking, of course). In most Western countries it’s very easy to shut down pirate groups — it’s just a matter of asking the ISP nicely.
Enter bulletproof servers. Pirate havens. Speakeasies of the 21st century — whatever you want to call them, they represent a way for pirate groups to operate safely and outside the law. Sweden, thanks to The Pirate Bay, is the most popular example of a ‘copyright safe haven’. Until the recent ruling against TPB, Sweden was considered very soft on copyright infringement — and the moment the judge’s gavel came down, I can assure you a lot of other illegal groups moved their servers out of the country.
But now that Sweden has capitulated to the international community and ‘gone straight’, guess where The Pirate Bay’s servers now located? In CyberBunker, an old nuclear bunker-cum-datacenter located 120 miles from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. How about Demonoid? They started in Serbia, but now they’re in the Ukraine. These guys can just keep on hopping around until they get bored and shut up shop. It makes you wonder a little about conventional national borders, eh?
Unsurprisingly, China is also a very popular destination for bulletproof servers. You have to assume that eventually every nation in the world will fall into line on the contentious issue of intellectual property, but I don’t think it will happen any time soon.
If the television, film and music industries would just make it easy for us — the whole world, not just select countries — to get our hands on reasonably-priced, high-quality media… well, I think we all know what would happen. Piracy would dry up in an instant.
‘Bulletproof’ safe havens are all the rage for Internet pirates originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Pirate Bay – BitTorrent – Law – Copyright infringement – Internet service provider
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In earlier eras of software development, programmers quite often had the luxury of using a stable version of a platform or API, because even when vendors updated their apps, OS’s, and middleware, the organizations relying on those platforms could implement those upgrades in their own time. But now with online web services, developers often have less control over updates to the API they are using, and unannounced changes to web service APIs are becoming a big problem, as Gartner’s Benoit Lheureux reports:
This week in Las Vegas at Gartner’s SOA / ADI Event I hosted a Analyst / User Roundtable on the topic of Cloud computing / SaaS integration. One attendee which has already (impressively) leveraged the services of a dozen SaaS vendors claims that four of the twelve providers have changed API’s without notification, impacting production operations. A few other members of the group cited some experience with what I’ll coin here (strictly for the entertainment value, of course) “API slamming”.
Rick Nucci also noted the issue in his post The Top 10 Most Common API Pitfalls, with inadequate API versioning making it in at number 3:
3. Developing a single version of your API which changes with each release of your SaaS application
Impact: Your customers get on the “API treadmill” which requires that they repeatedly have to test their integrations with each release of your application. This will inevitably lead to push back from the customer base which may result in pressure to reduce the frequency of your product releases.
There are some simple solutions. Alex King shows how to implement versioning with a simple modification to the API endpoint:
When people build to your APIs, they need to continue working – even if/when the APIs need to evolve over time. The best way to do this is to build API versioning right into the API URLs themselves.
Yes: api.example.com/1.0/command
No: api.example.com/command
Rick Nucci says providers should:
Think of your API as a contract between you and your customer. Once you release it, that specific version needs a SLA guaranteeing compatibility to it for some extensive period of time (years). As you release new versions of your application, version your API also.
You can find more on REST API versioning in an earlier series of blog posts from Peter Williams and this one from Dare Obasanjo. For a more SOAP-centric perspective on this, InfoQ has this handy book excerpt on Web Service Contract Versioning.
API Slamming, API Treadmill… Whatever you call it, the lack of a stable API is a major headache for developers, and with thousands of APIs to choose from, it is a quick way for vendors to lose customers to competing services.
If you’ve used a Palm Pre, you’re probably wondering just what’s possible with the webOS developer SDK. Over the last few updates, it would appear that Palm are really working to bump the number of technologies available for games — and the homebrew community has been busy looking at the updates to figure out what’s available.
Over the Christmas break, the folks at Pre Central noticed that some plucky coders have taken it upon themselves to bring DOOM, in full hardware-accelerated glory, to the Pre. Whilst it’s not ready for mainstream consumption, and requires the webOS 1.3.5 update that still isn’t out in certain areas of the world, the app certainly opened my eyes to applications that may potentially be in the pipeline for the Pre.
Be sure to check out the video of DOOM in action on the Pre after the break!
[via PreCentral - Photo by gillyberlin - http://flic.kr/p/76cQge]
webOS homebrew brings DOOM to the Palm Pre originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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PalmPre – WebOS – Handhelds – Palm OS – PreCentral
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Location-based social game FourSquare no longer has limits to where it can be used. When users click on their city name below the header of the website, they see a search box to enter a new city. Previously the service supported about 100 cities worldwide and anyone who lived elsewhere was out of luck.
CNet reports that this is a “soft-launch.” Along with sparse data in non-official cities, the service has several applications to update. For example, its iPhone app will require the App Store approval process.
Developers would be wise to make some changes to their applications, as well. A message in the developer forum recommends that “cityid calls should be replaced by geolat + geolong.” In other words, instead of FourSquare–and its apps–being city-specific, they now will focus within a radius of a user’s location.
The same will be the case from a user perspective, according to CNet:
As for your Foursquare friends list, which used to only display friends who were also signed on in the same designated Foursquare-approved city, the service now displays friends who have checked into locations in the same metropolitan area as determined by a given radius. Badges that are specific to location, like New York’s “Animal House” badge for checking into too many NYU beer-pong bars, remain city-centric, but badges that are awarded for general check-in habits (like the “Crunked” badge for checking in four times in a night) are now available everywhere.
For more information about FourSquare, see our FourSquare API profile or the post announcing its public availability.