You may have see the Open Video Player initiative was announced today. First, I want to applaud the people and companies involved for coming together to help create a developer framework for video player applications on the Web. Developers can download player source code and reference plug-ins for advertising technologies.
However, a couple of things disappointed me about the announcement. First, although the license for the code appears to be a fairly simple and liberal license and is likely OSD compliant, it is its own license. I'd like to see them use an existing open source license rather than draft something new.
Second, I don't see anything about collaboration on the code. There's nothing about a community process around advancing the code. I think to truly engage the developer community this has to be more than just publishing code. The code has to become a living, breathing project that can grow.
Finally, from the announcement:
What about building online video players using open source technologies? I agree that we need to open up standards and code for building media players because those technologies have become core to the Web experience today. But they need to be truly open technologies. Akamai has a chance with Open Video Player to do just that and I encourage them to consider supporting a truly open source video player platform.
This is a step in the right direction, but I completely agree with your community concerns. This is an opportunity for users to have access to create players, but will it be a truly collaborative coding opportunity? Wouldn't it be great if we could get these companies to purchase redistributive codec patent licenses and offer them for free? :)
Posted by: MaryBeth | September 15, 2008 at 10:37 AM
In my opinion, this is the problem that 'open source' has now created -- by avoiding talking about freedom, you now have a slew of apparently 'open' projects, who feel that a dependency on proprietary technology is fine, because they've put up some code in a zip file somewhere.
Free software might take twenty seconds to explain to someone, but it's a lot clearer of a concept than this mess, imo.
Posted by: Matt Lee | September 15, 2008 at 06:56 PM
Did you notice who the initiative partners are? They are Adobe, Microsoft, Akamai, Panache, KickApps, Eyewonder, ScanScout, 24-7 Realmedia, and Adveno. Look for Microsoft to embrace, extend, and extinguish this effort in time.
Posted by: Tuxi | September 26, 2008 at 05:00 AM