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Helix Player to be GPL'd

Submitted by robla on Mon, 2004-06-28 02:11. Gnome Multimedia

RealNetworks will be releasing the Helix Player under tri-license terms which will include the GPL in the next 30 days, thanks in no small part to the folks at Novell and Red Hat who pushed hard to make this happen. In very closely related news, Novell and Red Hat are both standardizing on the Helix Player as the standard media player on their commercial distrubutions. Details on all of this are available in the press releases (Real and Novell, Real and Red Hat), as well as this piece in the New York Times. Source code can be downloaded from the Helix Community

Re: Helix Player to be GPL'd

Submitted by salmo on Mon, 2004-06-28 08:38.

Big deal.

Ok, we have yet another media player that plays the same files (Real codecs are NOT being GPLed) in its own way. Besides that the thing has yet another wacked out interface.

At best maybe some interesting media-player design thoughts can be gleaned from it. At worst it gains some sort of market share and we're stuck working with code made for something totally different fr years.

Look at OpenOffice.org, or even Mozilla. Look how long it took them to stabilize. But it was worth it, they are both extremely complex pieces of software that we were not near approaching the functionality of on our own yet. The work put into making them work and making them fit in on the desktop was less than the work it would take us to write them ourselves. But not with Helix Player.

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