[luau] News - RealNetworks - Betting the Farm on Open Source?

[Warren Togami]

http://news.com.com/2008-1082-963788.html?tag=lh
"So far, open-source advocates have given RealNetworks' plans high
marks. And for the most part, analysts have concurred with Glaser's
interpretation that the corporate open-source failures of the past have
little relevance to his company's release. But questions remain: How
long can RealNetworks continue selling a streaming server while
Microsoft gives one away for free? To what extent can the company rely
on the market for IP devices? And even if RealNetworks is in a
fundamentally different position than its superficially similar
predecessors, has the company adequately studied those failures and
figured out how to avoid its own...?

"Q: What gave you the idea to release this code?

"A: We had been talking for a couple of years with some of our partners
because we always ran into this issue of having a partner that wanted to
build to and add on to our platform...Nokia came to us at the beginning
of the year, and they gave us the road map of the devices they wanted to
add Real to. And it was 12 different devices, and in some cases they had
different operating systems. You could wind up sucking up a whole
development organization in serving one partner. Nokia's a pretty
important partner, with 100 million phones a year, but we thought, 'Wow,
we have to change the model.' So with Nokia we created a very flexible
paradigm of how we would share source code and maintain
compatibility..." 
(continued in article)