From: Linus Nielsen Feltzing <linus_at_haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 08:42:59 +0100

Neon John wrote:

> Umm, what I said. I blame Neuros for lying about being open source for at
> least 2 years, all the while trying to wrap themselves in the glory of
> open source. They were claiming to be an open source company at least a
> year before they released ANYTHING.

That's the key issue here. If they really wanted to to create an open
source player in the first place, they made a huge mistake to choose
such a closed platform.

Forcing third party developers to purchase an expensive development
system is not the way to go if you want want a fair deal of support from
outsiders.

Relying on closed-source libraries for the essential codec work was
maybe a sane decision considering their choice of platform, but not a
wise one in the long run, as it further limits the possibilities for
third party developers wanting to contribute.

So they made some bad technical decisions, but I agree with John that
the worst one was to claiming to be open source when there was no source
available.

However, it seems like they are determined not to make the same mistake
again on their next platform. Time will tell.

Linus

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Received on 2004-11-16