On Thu, Sep 23, 1999 at 08:17:29PM -0700, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
> Well, I haven't looked directly at their stuff, but them doing 16-bit
> Unicode may not be all that bad, or at least has some reasons.
>=20
> Basically COM (which is what ActiveX is built on) does all strings as
> BSTR, which are 16-bit Unicode strings. So anyone doing Windows code for
> them is using 16-bit Unicode already, even if they are not aware of it.
Looking back at the CDDB2 site I see that they've now changed their
feature list to match comments made on this list. How very flattering.
CDDB2 is now using UTF8 and Mac + Unix support will be "forthcoming"
Since this is all Beta status they understandably (for a proprietary
software company, which is what they've now become) have a very
restrictive licensing agreement, so it is impossible for me to look
into this much further ATM.
=46rom what I have seen it seems that their intention is to kill stuff
like FreeDB by creating a new API and then progressively shutting
down the old service. The new API will likely be excessively complicated
or obfuscated to reduce the chances of anyone reverse-engineering it
without full specs. The new SDK, examples and technical documents are
available only to people who agree to the NEW CDDB terms (the ones
which sparked the creation of CDindex) and so cannot be used to help
with the RE process, even if that were desirable.
So people, every single client which speaks to CDDB2 will be forbidden
from talking to us. This is probably illegal (at least in the EU)
but it's unlikely to be defeated in a court of law. Instead we should
make sure everyone writing a CD app knows that CDindex will be here,
and won't EVER have such stupid restrictions.
NB GPL applications cannot be modified to work with CDDB2, because
that would break one license or the other. Therefore GPL writers
should be particularly aware of the need to support CDindex, or
failing that at least FreeDB.
Nick.
--d8Lz2Tf5e5STOWUP
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.0 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org
iD8DBQE4RhfyJL0BVnQb59gRAp0sAJ9CH9AwWau95y9I/bJVUyUMoY7LrgCfdjoA
PJ6vkjaS8tXFIc9ONSFHBlk=
=DQ1J
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--d8Lz2Tf5e5STOWUP--