Le 24/02/2010 16:00, Romain Beauxis a écrit : > Le mardi 23 février 2010 19:15:16, Gilles PIETRI a écrit : >> This scares me a lot. Not the 5$ fee, but the licensing by itself. I >> mean, it was probably time for winamp to actually go forward and promote >> a more free codec.. >> >> This is disturbing. >> >> Cheers, and sorry for the slightly off-topic rant > > On the contrary. I have the same feelings. I believe most of the web radio > that are using shoutcast are run by people that cannot/do not want to pay for > this licence. > > Thus, I see two alternatives: either they promote a free codec, or those > people will eventually move to icecast. > > Any of these are good for free software at large so... >
You are largely ignoring the impact of the shoutcast directory.. They have a handful of users already to distribute, and that can't be ignored by any serious webcaster. They were clever enough to negociate a low price I guess, and still make money on it (I doubt MP3 licensing cost as much as 5$ / encoder). Turning to icecast? Sure, why not? Well because dxo aka dir.xiph.org (hi balbinus) is great, could be greater probably, but is not used in any famous players or online directory and so on.. And just saying shoutcast/AOL is evil, and turning fully to a free solution is just not gonna work. Tempting at most, but when you can easily get a 10% user increase, both on your listeners & website visitors just by having a 500+ listener base on shoutcast (because of winamp, because of many sites that uses the shoutcast yp, because of .. well, their being successful, to summarize). So yeah, it's in theory good for free software, because of the free (as in beer and in speech) alternative, unless you consider 5$ a low enough price, and you mainly don't care about the FSF goals (and trust me, 90% of the people streaming on the 5 first pages of the shoutcast directory really don't have a clue, or give a care about all that ;)).. But it probably won't be so great in the end, bringing "the industry" towards a new closed protocol, on a closed set of software, on a proprietary codec. And don't even get me started on OGG stream support, even on FOSS platforms. This is all free ranting obviously, but it might still be a good starting point for the next big content company that might want to go after shoutcast's market share :) Regards, Gilou ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Savonet-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/savonet-users
