socialmedian: Open Source ‘Napster’ Resurrected After 8-Year Dormancy

User-submitted headlines for this story

Clip

Open Source ‘Napster’ Resurrected After 8-Year Dormancy

Source: Wired: Epicenter

Nov 03, 2009

Summary

A small group of programmers plans to breathe new life into the Napster-spawned OpenNap protocol that was designed to help dejected music fans share files using similar technology after the official Napster servers blinked off.

The team says the open source OpenNap 2.0, still under development, will ignore “copyrighted” music files in an attempt to avoid the sort of RIAA scrutiny that shut down the original Napster and its open source clone, the first OpenNap. They don’t seem totally clear on how to do this — only that it’s worth doing because when the first Napster came into being, no licensed online source offered a comprehensive catalog of music. Given today’s legitimate online music marketplace, these guys think it’s time for a non-infringing descendant of Napster.

Project lead Wayne Facer, a fan of the original Napster who was not involved in the earlier OpenNap iteration, said he and two other open source programmers have taken over the project on SourceForge.net after trying unsuccessfully to contact its original developers, and are rewriting the code f

...Read the full article

Comments (0)

Add Your Comment