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20050417 Sunday April 17, 2005

NIN's Open Source Music versus Linus and Larry's metadata propriety I was saddened to read of Larry McVoy's stand on Andrew Tridgell's BitKeeper client development (I like Larry, BitKeeper, etc... which is what makes this tough) and the attacks from Linus Torvalds that followed. Contrast this with Trent Reznor.

What's the connection? The source data for Nine Inch Nails' new single, "The Hand That Feeds" is available to download and muck with in GarageBand. This is a very different attitude about openness and derivative works.

From Make:

"For quite some time I've been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks -- to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what's there," Reznor says. Here's a screenshot of it on my Mac (View image) and here's where to get it (70MB file). Here are a couple of the first remixes!
This came via Joi Ito and he aptly nails it (no pun will go unpunned!):
"Now if only they would put some kind of Creative Commons license on it, it would be perfect."
I'd prefer that BitMover focused more on innovating the platform (perhaps "application lifecycle management" is excessively hi-falootin but it's not freakishly off-base), there's a lot of room for SCM products to add value or integrate with other pieces adding value elsewhere in the application development chain. Closing the door to third party client innovation is a failure of imagination. Larry is pretty much counting on his internal team (talented though they may be), to be wiser than the community at large about how clients should function, how product specification should interoperate with SCM, how bug and issue tracking should work with SCM, etc. Open client development and derivative works is where it's at. It seems like no new service these days is launched without providing some kind of REST API (I just started checking out recently emerged Upcoming yesterday, the API issue is on page one). The ubiquity of Creative Commons is an undenialable force. Well, I'm not on Larry's case per se, I do admire the guy but the absence of cluetrain savvy is disappointing nonetheless. photo

Maybe in my copious spare time I'll figure out how to have some fun with GarageBand.

( Apr 17 2005, 09:21:07 AM PDT ) Permalink