UPFRONT

Founded by Rob Glaser, a former high-level Microsoft executive, RealNetworks has been a highly proprietary streaming media business that seemed to fit the Microsoft mold. Yet RealNetworks' biggest competitor also happened to be Microsoft, which lately had become more and more aggressive in the streaming media business.

In July, RealNetworks embarked on an extreme strategy: they took part of their software open source. Specifically, they announced Helix, a set of tools for streaming and caching “all major media types”, including RealAudio/RealVideo, QuickTime, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Windows Media and Ogg Vorbis. At the time of the announcement, the server was slated to run on 11 different operating systems, including Linux. RealNetworks claimed that the server, running on Linux, delivered four times the performance of Windows Media Server 8 while delivering Windows Media and Real files simultaneously.

The Real codecs are still available only through a strictly proprietary license. When I interviewed Rob Glaser at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention—on the day RealNetworks announced Ogg Vorbis support—he compared the role of codecs to that of packaging in a shipping system. RealNetworks' business is shipping bits, not packaging them, he explained. Customers can use Real's own packaging, or whatever else they like, such as Ogg Vorbis, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, etc.

At the time of this writing there are two licenses: a proprietary “RealNetworks Community Source License (RCSL)”, which is “structured to ensure that all products built under the RCSL remain compatible with the Helix interfaces”, and a RealNetworks Public Source License (RPSL), which “is structured to provide developers greater flexibility in their use of the source code”. This one is described as “similar” to the GPL in respect to certain copyleft provisions, but different in respect to “patent issues”. The company also will license several patents and pending patent applications to the Helix community.

After the announcement, Bruce Perens published a detailed analysis of RealNetwork's plans at that point. He wrote:

The announcement drew inevitable comparisons to Netscape's announcement of Mozilla in 1998—after which the project took more than four years to deliver a 1.0 product. “Unlike the Mozilla Project, we do not plan on rewriting everything from scratch”, one Real employee wrote to me.

—Doc Searls

What you need is a nerdy guy who'd do anything for you. Who would leave presents at your door and make web sites in your image: beautiful and grand, lyrical and edgy. You need a geek who would wait years for you, secretly, despite his own welfare. You need someone who won't make fun of the bad music kids these days love.

Instead of trolling the skate parks and beaches, you should sit outside a cyber café or an engineering department, browse through the aisles of Fry's Electronics, become a member of the Battery Club at Radio Shack.

—Tony Pierce

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

—Napoléon Bonaparte

Advertising is not a means of supporting media. Media is an excuse for presenting advertising.

—Rusty Foster

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

—Scott Adams

Proprietary data is the root of tyranny.

—Britt Blaser

The user group communities in the Bay Area have dwindled away, largely because installing and using GNU/Linux isn't as exciting or new or challenging anymore. Installfests made sense in the Slackware era, but now any newbie can point-and-click through a Mandrake install. I can now safely write about the user groups in the past tense.

—Nick Moffitt