[clug] Linux recipe management

Alex Satrapa alexsatrapa at mac.com
Sun Sep 20 21:48:49 MDT 2009


On 21/09/2009, at 11:13 , Daniel Pittman wrote:

> Oh, and owning the data: colour me paranoid, but I don't want to  
> depend on a
> third party to maintain my own recipe data, since I don't fancy  
> paying extra
> for it, and most of these sites won't let me pay for them to care  
> anyhow...

For those who missed the '90s, a classic example of this problem was  
CDDB. It started off life as a freely accessible database of CD song  
titles: the idea was your CD player could connect to the database,  
identify the CD being played, and magically be able to show you the  
track titles. That was a novel feature back in the '90s.

Eventually the CDDB got sold of to some folks who *promised* it would  
always be freely accessible. Those folks then went and made CDDB a  
commercially licenced service (according to Wikipedia it was three  
years, but it felt like three months).

The great hue and cry at the time was that the CDDB was built by  
voluntary contributions (people would type out the track titles in  
their CD player software and submit the track titles to CDDB), and  
Sony was suddenly expecting these people to pay for access to the data  
that they contributed.

Anyway, apologies for the tangent. We now return you to our regular  
programming ...



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