Parity Violation

Handbrake is a program I like, which is great at extracting DVDs I own to iPod compatible formats. However, this forum post by one of the developers points out the problem I have with open source.

The posting makes it clear that the developers of handbrake make it for themselves, and have no interest in responding to feedback from users, unless the user themselves are interested in coding up a solution themselves. So, it would seem open source is a by-programmers, for-programmers venture.

This is a fine philosophy. After all, the programmers spend a lot of time and energy into making Handbrake, and can do what they want, and since no one is paying them, why should they respond to people who only use Handbrake?

But, it’s also, the problem with open source. No responsibility to customers, because there are no customers. With this sort of attitude, it’s no surprise so many open source projects lack any polish – so long as it works for the one task the programmer or programmers have in mind, why add any improvements suggested by the lowly non-programmer?

Could this by why the GIMP is worse than Photoshop? Why Linux is less usable than OS X, or dare I say, Windows? Why so many open source programs require bizarre compile fests, etc?

For myself, I want software that does the task I want it to, without having to contribute to the SVN Tree to get a feature I want. Thus, I am very glad some software developers are happy to charge for their software, because at least this means they respond to my requests.

Now, some open source projects are incredibly successful and popular (apache, php, wordpress and others come to mind). I think the key is for a project to have a diverse and large population of contributors… but I still feel like Wordpress and apache respond to user requests … not just what the developers themselves want. Perhaps I’m wrong.

Astros put up a crooked number in the 8th and look well on their way to winning their first game out in Cincy. Berkman finally got an RBI and Lane added a big home run. No hits for Biggio though. He needs to work some walks, 0 walks for the season – that’s crazy. He used to walk a lot.

My cable company, however, is really incompetent. I bought the “Extra Innings” package (financed by some eBay sales) so I could watch the Astros here. Now, inDemand who handles these sports packages has fourteen GAME channels that they show hockey and baseball games on. Earlier this year, they added four more channels, so previously they were just ten GAME channels.

But, my cable company and others struggled to get the four additional GAME channels added, which meant I was missing several baseball games every night (including the Astros) – a problem that is somewhat widespread. Now ,even though the channels at least exist, there was no picture on the Astros Reds game, so I missed the Astros rally and win.

The tech support crew are all nice enough, but they only know how to do two things – reset the box, or schedule a technician to come out. They seem unaware of any system wide problems and unable to see if the problems are bigger than just my lonely tv.

Anyway, someone on the email end of the cable company seems competent, so I emailed again and we’ll see if gets fixed. I’ll be out of town for a bit, so hopefully it’ll work properly once I get back. Knock on wood.

So, Apple and EMI announced a short while ago, that they’d sell EMI’s entire catalog on iTunesmost of EMI’s catalog without DRM, and at twice the bitrate of previous iTunes tracks, starting in May. The DRM-free part, I predicted, but I was not expecting the a) higher price ($1.29 per song), or b) the higher file size / quality.

I actually listened to the press conference, but no one really asked the questions I have. But anyway, here are some random thoughts/questions that occur to me now.

• Who’s idea was it to leave the DRM on the $0.99 cent tracks? Was this to give people some pricing incentive to stay “locked” to the iPod as some believe is Apple’s plan? Or, was this something EMI came up with to entice people to pay a bit more for the DRM-free version. (EMI finally got a price increase, something they’ve wanted for a while, but all artists/tracks are still the same price, so not exactly what they had in mind.)

• What about other, independent labels, that don’t require DRM – such as all the ones on eMusic? Will they be able to sell their music on iTunes DRM free? At what price? At what bitrate?

• What about iTunes give-aways. Like, if you win some code or something for a free song. Is it a DRM free song or the old DRMed version?

• Did EMI use this DRM-free hook to finally get Apple to budge on pricing? I’m really curious how much of this new paradigm was EMI’s idea and how much was Apple’s.

• They left the album price the same, even in the new “premium” download version, so this looks like another attempt to make album sales more popular.

• How many music players play unprotected AAC files? The only one that comes to mind is the Zune, but I suppose without DRM it’s easy to transcode to mp3 or any other format anyone likes.

• Jobs predicted half the tracks on iTunes will be DRM-free by the end of the year. Which other labels are going to follow suit? Is everyone going to follow this twice-the-size, no DRM, $0.30 more plan? And again, what about independent labels.

• All Apple wants is to sell iPods. Does this help? Is doubling the size some way to make us buy… larger capacity iPods or to upgrade our iPods?

• Can we just choose on a per-track-basis to buy the “premium” tracks? It sounds like there will be some iTunes store preference to automagically buy the premium tracks if available. But for me, I’d rather pick and choose. I can see added value for classical music, but for the random other songs I buy… eh, I’d rather save the money then get a bigger file and no DRM. I’m not going to buy something other than an iPod any time soon anyway.

• How does this impact “complete my album?” If I bought a DRM’ed EMI track a while back, and now I want to “complete” the album at a reduced price… do I get the non-DRMed version or the DRM’ed… or will it ask me if I also want to upgrade the DRM’ed track to “premium?”

• Non-DRM music videos seem to have value (they’re still $1.99.) It should be easy to extract the audio for iPod listening (I expect freeware/shareware tools to do this automatically will pop up very soon) and they’re price is the same as the old DRMed videos. Of coures is the audio bitrate 256 or 128 on these new DRM-free videos

Ok, so those are my initial reactions. As you can see, it introduces some complexity to the whole iTunes simplicity. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s implemented in May.

I suppose those who said Apple was just lying about an interest in selling DRM music have to eat their words now. I don’t think this solution is going to please everyone because a) they cost more, and b) DRM remains on the cheaper tracks. But, it’s a step in the right direction.

Hmm, I have no idea how many songs I own from iTunes are from EMI, but the $0.30 per track upgrade feature is somewhat interesting to me. Again, mainly on classical music.

UPDATE In his famous open letter on this whole matter jobs said:

If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Clearly, they’re not selling “only” DRM free music. It’s still unclear whether keeping the old, DRMed, $0.99, 128 kbps tracks was Apple’s idea, or EMI’s.

Glenn Greenwald paints a frightening picture of the opinions of Mitch Romney and Rudy Giuliani. They were asked if the president should have the power to imprison a citizen without any sort of review. Giuliani said he would want this power and use it “rarely.” Romney said he’d have to discuss with “smart lawyers.”

There is no freedom more basic than trial by jury and the inability of an executive to imprison citizens indefinitely without review. Yet, this is apparently mainstream thought in the Republican party today.

Andrew Sullivan cited Winston Churchill in the matter:

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgement by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist.

Speculation seems to be that this EMI event will involve the Beatles catalog, such is the speculation in this Variety article for instance.

No one seems to be speculating that perhaps they’re going to agree to sell music DRM-free. EMI’s chief has mulled this idea in the recent past.

So, my guess it’s one of these things. Maybe both! We’ll know tomorrow.

UPDATE: Whoops, I missed this Reuters story which says it won’t be about the Beatles but indeed, may involve removing DRM.

UPDATE II: Indeed, no DRM on EMI iTunes Music starting next month. The downside … they cost more per track ($1.29), but they’re at 256 kbps so twice the quality (and twice the size). Not as cool as just removing the DRM and keeping the price the same… but still pretty good.

I think EMI used this DRM-free initiative to raise prices… which the industry has wanted for a while. So, they’re doing so with the lure of DRM-free. My guess is, this is more what EMI wanted (the press release mentions EMI raising wholesale prices) than what Apple wanted (since Apple doesn’t make money on iTunes anyway, they just want to sell iPods).

Of course why the DRM-enabled tracks remain at all (on the older, $.99 tracks) is a good question.