About free software and yellow pages...

Even if it has happened in the past that I could support a pragmatic approach in the context of free software and media technologies, there is something that offenses me in the context of free audio players.

In the world of audio streaming servers on for net radios, there are two majors competitors. In the one hand, Shoutcast, the commercial proprietary streaming server released by Nullsoft, which is also the editor of Winamp, the popular media player.

On the other hand, Icecast, which started as an open source implementation of the protocol used by Shoutcast, but was rewritten in its version 2 release to support the free codecs from xiph.

Now, appart from the respective quality of the two servers, the real competition takes place in another place: availability of the radios using this or that server. For that purpose, both have implemented Yellow Pages. Shoutcast’s yellow pages are here, whereas Icecast/Xiph’s yellow pages are there.

The great thing with yellow pages is their integration into the audio player. Then, the user can browse the list of radios, and test them. It is very good both for convenience — no need to download a playlist or enter manually a complicated URL — and advertisement — a single place to list all possible radios.

The yellow pages from Shoutcast are very popular. They are integrated in Winamp — of course, but also in many other popular players, in the PSP, in the iPhone, etc...

The Shoutcast yellow pages are reserved for shoutcast users. Of course, the protocol has been reversed — it is kind of dummy — but if your radio get caught registering to Shoutcast’s yellow pages while not using their proprietary software, your radio gets blacklisted and you loose a whole lot of listeners (and money too). For that reason, many net radios want to use Shoutcast as their broadcasting server.

From the point of view of Nullsoft, it seems a good call. At least, they play their game and make their money out of it, so let’s put this appart. But, what about the free software world ?

The obvious idea would be that the free software projects should push altogether for the use of free alternatives, hence pushing for a support of Icecast’s yellow pages in the free players. Of course, free software being also a matter of choice, it should be possible to also support Shoutcast’s yellow pages. After all, both protocols are very simple, so it is no big deal to implement..

Well, unfortunately, that is not exactly what happens.. Guess what, Amarok and VLC only implement Shoutcast’s yellow pages... Given that VLC is a massively popular audio player that spreads among a lot of plateforms, I find it quite a pity that they do not do something to encourage its users to use free alternatives to the proprietary Shoutcast yellow pages, and similarly for Amarok.

The adoption of free alternatives only works with massive demand, and we should not hope that proprietary softwares help in any way, but, at least, free softwares should be a bit more aware of what they’re advocating when they choose to implement only the proprietary support...