I’ve found it really frustrating to learn that many people in the developer world and indeed the world in general stupidly mixes ‘key’ selling words like ‘Open Standards’, ‘Open Source’ etc.. wrongly.
Here is what the Director, BBC Future Media & Technology had to say about seeing AAC and H.264 being adopted in the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/08/open_industry_standards_for_au.html.
After reading that, I think it can be concluded that Erik Huggers is not suitable for the job. Either he is rediculously not clued up. OR he is in the pockets of Apple.
AAC _requires_ a patent license to implement. It is NOT open standards. Ogg Vorbis and Theora can very well be! (At this time apparently no one knows whether there are hidden patents associated with those technologies)
In any case, this is more reasons not to have software patents in the first place. Erik Huggers could be right that they’re open standards in the UK as software patents are not recognised. However we live in a world, not a single country. Half the world do acknowledge software patents.
Direct from the site:
“Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source.”
Go onto their site and see their demo, it looks quite good. Very handy for the end user to grab songs on all kinds of sites and play them on your own computer and even record it for your own use.
BUT
What is the legal implications for this. As a concerned web designer, Songbird seems to unrestrictively download all songs that it files from a page in order to “stream” it to the end user straight away. This means a huge server and bandwidth load for the person/site concerned and as a site owner myself, I do not approve of automated downloading and I feel Songbird is treading in dangerous grounds. In this day and age, where even google was sued for caching contents of sites, it is not a good idea.
Maybe I got it wrong, but that’s what it seems like from their screencast anyway. I guess those who want to protect their content on the site would place it behind a php link and link to a directory that cannot be easily guessed.. i.e. using anti-hotlinking.
Anyhow, I admit I did not even try the software, but this is a first impression critic. If it proves true, then it is a critic of them in general, if it isn’t true then it is a critic of the information they’ve conveyed to me.
I was just checking out the microsoft website to see when the hell they’re gonna release a patch for VS2005 for Vista, as it was still Beta last time I checked. Today I found that on the 6th, March, they’ve finally released the final version of the patch!
Great news! Now I can get on with my project! (I upgraded to Vista straight away -.-”")
You can get it at this URL
