In February, professor Eben Moglen inspired the creation of the Diaspora open source social networking project when in his speech to the Internet Society at NYU, he said:
Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.
And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.
I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.
Last night, it was the turn of Rob Spectre, community evangelist for Boxee, who dropped by the NYLUG in order to grow the community.
Spectre pointed out that while open source technology is widely deployed throughout the internet from the largest core data centers to the newest cell phones, it is absent from the living. This is due largely to the monolith in the living room, as in, “my god, it’s full of patent lawyers!”
EFF and Harvard legal expert Wendy Seltzer explained the problem in detail a year ago. She wrote, “Under an anticircumvention regime, the producers of media content can authorize or deny authorization to technologies for playing their works. Open source technologies and their developers cannot logically be authorized. ‘Open-source DRM’ is a contradiction in terms, for open source encourages user modification (and copyleft requires its availability), while DRM compels ‘robustness’ against those same user modifications.”
The content control corporations are the antithesis of Boxee. Boxee, Spectre said, is the best open source social media center. It connects to Facebook and Twitter. You can recommend a show to a friend who is on Boxee. It connects to the offerings (free or paid) of online services from Hulu to MLB to Suicide Girls (may be NSFW).
The open source network will never interact with the closed content network because doing so would require DRM (see Seltzer, above), so Boxee aggregates content that’s available on the web. Spectre says that paid content such as MLB and free shows such as The Guild (Melissa’s a huge fan of The Guild and I like their theme song).
Ideas, bug notes, and recommendations can be fed to the community at the Get Satisfaction site.
Boxee is still a small organization (13 people) with a potentially big influence on the future of television. Offices are in New York and San Francisco with engineering in Tel Aviv.
Spectre noted that the project supports most CODECs. A NYLUG member added that the interface is extremely intuitive and said that while you might need to be a programmer to write an app, you certainly don’t need any special expertise to use Boxee.
Many applications are channels, linking users to specific websites that deliver content. A few deliver functionality instead of linking to specific content.
Spectre said that he got started in the community when a friend suggested that he enter an app development contest. He wrote Auto-Tune the News, named after the web show but designed to deliver popular TV shows such as The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert. “It’s one of the most popular source contributions I’ve ever made,” Spectre said.
With the positive response, he decided to work for the community. He wrote Boxee apps professionally (as a freelance for hire) for several months before joining the team.
“We get the content providers who are on the web; we get no interest from those who are not on the web. History is on our side,” Spectre concluded.
The Boxee business model will change radically in July, when a payment platform is introduced. Intially, it will deliver subscriptions only, but micropayments (buy one episode) will be added and then advertising will be added later.
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