I don't believe he said he was shocked at the disagreement - rather, he
was shocked at the personal tone of -some- of the attacks.
>I think the reason people are so pissed off at you guys is because you
>have attempted to unilaterally usurp something that we all built. You
>didn't build it, you just stole it and now you're trying to tell us
>how we can access the data that we ourselves typed in.
As far as I can remember the CDDB project, back before Escient bought
it, had terms on the web site (when it was cddb.org) which said that
data that was submitted was more or less considered "donated" to the
project. The web page said at the time, pretty explicitly, that they
were looking for a commercial vendor to take on the time and expense of
running CDDB because the individual in question (Mr. Tam?) didn't have
the time. E-mail addresses were effectively optional for submission.
This turn of events could have been seen a long way off. Nobody
squawked when Escient bought CDDB. What were they supposed to do, sit
on it? Home multimedia networks aren't here *yet*, and right about now
would be a good time to get some brand recognition started.
/Steve