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Open Source Linux

Netflix Touts Open Source, Ignores Linux 481

Julie188 writes "If Netflix loves open source, where's the Linux client? Last week's post from Netflix on its use of open source has gotten a lot of coverage from the tech press. Too bad nobody's called the video giant out on its hypocrisy: They benefit greatly from open source, but really don't care to let their customers do the same."
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Netflix Touts Open Source, Ignores Linux

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  • by seedtime ( 656136 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @07:35PM (#34568130) Homepage
    That was my first thought. I don't often post but this is just a tad bit ridiculous. They are meeting the majority of their customers needs first. What about supporting all the other open source platforms? Linux is not the only one. There is a lot of open source that is not Linux. (JBoss, Apache, etc . . . )
  • by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @07:47PM (#34568308)
    From the Netflix website:

    "The great thing about a good open source project that solves a shared challenge is that it develops it's own momentum and it is sustained for a long time by a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. At Netflix we jumped on for the ride a long time ago and we have benefited enormously from the virtuous cycles of actively evolving open source projects. We benefit from the continuous improvements provided by the community of contributors outside of Netflix. We also benefit by contributing back the changes we make to the projects. By sharing our bug fixes and new features back out into the community, the community then in turn continues to improve upon bug fixes and new features that originated at Netflix and then we complete the cycle by bring those improvements back into Netflix."

    "Here is an incomplete sampling of the projects we utilize, we have contributed back to most of them: Hudson, Hadoop, Hive, Honu, Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Ivy, Cassandra, HBase, etc, etc."

    http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-use-and-contribute-to-open.html [netflix.com]
  • by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @07:50PM (#34568336)

    They are mooching.

    They have taken from the commons and aren't giving back.

    Wrong. They contribute to the projects they use.

    "Here is an incomplete sampling of the projects we utilize, we have contributed back to most of them: Hudson, Hadoop, Hive, Honu, Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Ivy, Cassandra, HBase, etc, etc."
    http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-use-and-contribute-to-open.html [netflix.com]

  • by pavon ( 30274 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @07:51PM (#34568346)

    The Netflix streams are all have proprietary DRM protection. To write our own client we would have to reverse engineer this proprietary protocol (which is legal, but can be difficult), and then worse, we would have hack the authorized players, and to get the DRM keys out of them. This implementation would constitute a circumvention device, and using or distributing it would be illegal under the DMCA.

    Asking open source customers to break the law to use your service isn't exactly friendly to open source.

  • Re:Roku is linux (Score:3, Informative)

    by Devrdander ( 1105175 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @09:15PM (#34569062)
    The Roku box actually has DRM support in the hardware, as do most of the set top boxes and integrated devices. Linux itself just runs the front end for the hardware decoder.
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @09:27PM (#34569156)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Izaak ( 31329 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:46PM (#34569740) Homepage Journal

    Dude, if they had actually released the source code to their client, someone would have already ported it to Linux (heck, I would do it nobody else stepped up). Netflix uses open source tools in the course of doing business. That is very different than actually releasing their product as open source.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @11:08PM (#34569902)

    Completely off base. Microsoft won't license the DRM components of silverlight, and until they do, there is no discussion of netflix on linux. But thanks for assuming something completely random and jumping into the fray.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16, 2010 @12:52AM (#34570464)

    The only plausible excuse would be that the content owners from which they license content wouldn't license their content to Netflix if Netflix had a desktop Linux player.

    That's actually it. It isn't some conspiracy, or a secret. I'm a random Ubuntu user, and I looked into the whole netflix thing, and I consider one thread to be definitive [1].

    I want to quote the netflix rep posting in the thread as saying that he uses Ubuntu and that netflix would love to have a linux client if they could get the rights to do one. But, cut and paste doesn't work for me on slashdot :(

    Anyway, read it for yourself. It is pretty clear that Netflix is on our side.

    [1] developer.netflix.com/forum/read/49086

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