deaddb

July 2, 2006 8:18 AM

freedb.org is closing down. After the main developers quit yesterday, freedb will shut down "in the forseeable future".
posted by scruss (27 comments total)

So MusicBrainz has to take up the mantle?
posted by Gyan at 8:23 AM on July 2, 2006

I heart bullshit nerd infighting.
posted by cillit bang at 8:28 AM on July 2, 2006

It's amazing just how immature some of these people seem to be. When it comes down to it, the biggest thing wrong with all things GPL is that so much of it seems to be run by whiny little children.
posted by reklaw at 8:29 AM on July 2, 2006

Oh, it happens in non-GPL things, too. You just don't hear about it as much. In-fighting within (and between) companies is surprisingly awful to behold.
posted by SteelyDuran at 8:33 AM on July 2, 2006

Sounds like an attempt to get some money.
posted by furtive at 8:36 AM on July 2, 2006

After reading, I side with the founder, not the guys who bailed. I've dealt with similar problems at work, developers will say "Oh we can do this! We can do that!".. if we convert to some wizz-bang .Net or .ASP or whatever when in fact our hands are tied and we cant. (some of our users are on mainframes for crying out loud!) So, the developers feel like they are being stifled, get frustrated and quit. They cant handle not working with the latest and greatest toys. Welcome to the real world kids. I know this isnt exactly what the founder of freedb is dealing with, but I see a similarity.
posted by BillsR100 at 8:49 AM on July 2, 2006

MusicBrainz is sadly not a great alternative. They're technically pretty good, but a large chunk of their data (the really interesting stuff) is covered by a Creative Commons license that only allows noncommercial use, as per their license page.

Luckily, a lot of this stuff is already available in free form in places like Wikipedia. It's just a matter of extracting it and putting it into a database, something I've personally thought about doing, but I'm not sure I have time for more personal projects... Same goes for IMDB-like information, actually. If anyone's interested in discussing that, drop me a line or something.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:02 AM on July 2, 2006

After reading, I side with the founder, not the guys who bailed. I've dealt with similar problems at work, developers will say "Oh we can do this! We can do that!".. if we convert to some wizz-bang .Net or .ASP or whatever when in fact our hands are tied and we cant.

Did you read it? It sounded more like someone had started a snazzy Web 2.0 style project, and the devs had been helping that guy with the understanding it would be GPL'd and become freedb 2.0. Eventually they decided the guy wasn't going to cooperate with that, and the owner of the freedb domain took action based on that without consulting the devs. Faux pas, but not at all analagous to the situation you describe.

It's amazing just how immature some of these people seem to be. When it comes down to it, the biggest thing wrong with all things GPL is that so much of it seems to be run by whiny little children.

You don't know 'whiny little children' until you talk to the users of free software. I have a lot more sympathy with guys who've volunteered 6 years of their free time, and decide to move on to other things, than those who scream 'You owe me!' when said volunteer walks.
posted by verb at 9:05 AM on July 2, 2006

Yay, nerd infighting. I'm sure there's a long and painful story here, but as a user of freedb I could care less. What I care about is I have about 3 different programs I use regularly that have the freedb.org web service baked into them. And at least one of them is unlikely to ever see another release pointing to a new location. I hope someone figures out a way to continue to run the existing service.
posted by Nelson at 9:32 AM on July 2, 2006

"You don't know 'whiny little children' until you talk to the users of free software..."

Wasn't this what Doctor Zhivago was warning us about? I'm reminded of how the socialists (who may have called themselves communists but potaytoh potahtoh) stormed the house at the end taking stuff as if it was owed them, when all they did was take over the aristocratic government so that they could steal from the aristocrats in the name of the motherland.

When you take stuff, you don't have as much respect for it as when you earn stuff. I say that AND I've been a heartless consumer of freeware, shareware, and other warez in the past. Nowadays it's becoming like admitting you used to have a problem with pot but you never inhaled or whatever, and whether one still uses pirated copies of software or not its generally a don't ask don't tell policy.

With that said, I don't recall ever consciously using freedb for anything, so it doesn't affect me directly. It is a sign of the times perhaps. I dread the day when Wikipedia shuts down due to infighting and a lack of funds. I depend on Wikis a lot, but am too lazy, cheap, poor, insert-favorite-excuse-here to cowboy up. Financially speaking.
posted by ZachsMind at 9:37 AM on July 2, 2006

.

I really hope someone continues the service in some fashion.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:42 AM on July 2, 2006

This isn't the same cddb used by CDEX, is it?

What exactly is hurt by the closing of freedb?
posted by washburn at 9:58 AM on July 2, 2006

What exactly is hurt by the closing of freedb?

Almost all software which can get CD information from the internet?
posted by unmake at 10:10 AM on July 2, 2006

Nelson - audiograbber.ini stores the freedb server location in:
CDDBServer=us.freedb.org
CDDBHTTPPath=/~cddb/cddb.cgi

so that, at least, can be replaced by whatever CDDB-compliant system comes next. (For instance, us.freedb.org is 64.71.163.204, which works as the CDDBServer even if the domain won't resolve). Or one could even put the server & database on a local machine and just add "127.0.0.1 us.freedb.org" to their hosts file. This doesn't help if the freedb mirrors stop updating, but I doubt that people will just shut it all down because of this - that's what's nice about open source - anyone can work on it. For something like this, I imagine that somebody will do just that.
posted by sysinfo at 10:14 AM on July 2, 2006

freedbs future did not seem to be kept free regarding the lastest developments, so I tried to steer against this as I felt it more important to stay free instead of getting fancy web 2.0 features

Sounds like the project lead was right in his decision. I have respect for the developers working on the project, but I also know how enticing it can be to take some shortcuts to roll a product out the door instead of doing it the "right" way, which generally tends to be more painful. Six years is a long time to devote to a project, and it sounds like their desire to get the 2.0 release was more important to them than the original founding principles of the freedb project. I'm glad the domain (and project) are still in the hands of the idealists.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:34 AM on July 2, 2006

Damn, and I bought MediaMonkey based on a MeFite's suggestion. I hope it can be patched to point to another service.
posted by mkhall at 11:24 AM on July 2, 2006

Off the top of my head, even if your software is crap and can't be pointed to other servers, you can always configure either your hosts file or your firewall/router/DNS to redirect the host name or IP to somewhere else. A bit of a pain, but not that much work, once there's a server somewhere that supports the same protocol.

Given that there were mirrors of freedb around, I assume they won't take those down, although the names might change, so read-only access is unlikely to disappear. Might be a little time before someone takes over the central master database, though.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:07 PM on July 2, 2006

"Almost all software which can get CD information from the internet?"

Oh.

So since i use Winamp, this does affect me directly. Duh.
posted by ZachsMind at 1:38 PM on July 2, 2006

You can download the software and latest DB from freedb, and host your own...
posted by nomisxid at 1:39 PM on July 2, 2006

Thanks for all the good news about a recovery plan should the main freedb.org go down. It is key that the database is free; I'm seeding the torrent for it even as we speak.
posted by Nelson at 3:41 PM on July 2, 2006

Why the hell did it need a "web-2.0" style interface when it was embedded into programs anyway?
posted by Paris Hilton at 1:22 AM on July 3, 2006

Did you read it? It sounded more like someone had started a snazzy Web 2.0 style project

Well, this is actually what they described:

For almost two years now Ari and I have supported a developer from Australia, who was working on the next generation of the freedb server, which would have overcome most of our current technological problems and offered text searching.

It sounds like they may have had legitimate issues to overcome.

Anyway, if the developer was working his spare time, well, what do you expect?
posted by Paris Hilton at 1:27 AM on July 3, 2006

reklaw writes "the biggest thing wrong with all things GPL is that so much of it seems to be run by whiny little children."

Um...
posted by youarenothere at 7:54 AM on July 3, 2006

Speaking of MusicBrainz, are there any (noncommercial) programs that use it for CD ripping or playback? I've been using their clients to manually retag my music, but it's a tedious second step after copying a CD.
posted by Eamon at 8:56 AM on July 3, 2006

Exact Audio Copy, which can be modified-in-program to change the freedb server location, works very well as a CD ripping application. It can compress to many of your favourite formats (using an externally linked encoder) and tag your files appropriately.
posted by wesley at 10:06 AM on July 3, 2006

"the biggest thing wrong with all things GPL is that so much of it seems to be run by whiny little children."

Fixed it for ya.
posted by spazzm at 5:08 PM on July 3, 2006

washburn writes "This isn't the same cddb used by CDEX, is it?"

Yep.
posted by Mitheral at 10:43 AM on July 4, 2006