Bradley Kuhn on switching back from Ubuntu to Debian

[Elliot Murphy]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 5:44 AM, Martin Owens <doctormo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Everyone knows I have a very high appreciation for FLOSS principles. But
> the work that's going on with the Music Store... that is going to be
> incredibly useful to advocates, it's a missing piece, full integration
> and a way to move people away from iTunes. Getting big business music
> into the mix will surely have strings that make releasing code more
> difficult.

Yes, thats true. The REST API that we get from the music partner is
written in such a way that we cannot expose the code that grabs mp3s
out of the shop after they have been purchased without giving everyone
a key to the whole warehouse. This is obviously a flawed design when
considered in the context of open source. As you noted that means we
are forced to keep some bits of the software closed (the bits that do
the initial transfer of an mp3 from the warehouse into your Ubuntu One
music folder). We're keeping that abstracted away from the file
sharing server code as much as possible though to keep future options
open where we can.
-- 
Elliot Murphy | https://launchpad.net/~statik/