Apple gets shirty about open source podcasting tool

  • From: "djc" <djc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: blindcasting@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 14:45:41 -0800

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Apple gets shirty about open source podcasting tool
Karen Gomm
ZDNet UK
November 15, 2005, 16:20 GMT
The coders behind a handy tool for handling podcasts have been paid a
little visit
by Apple's legal team
Open source developers have changed the name of an application after
pressure from
Apple's lawyers.
iPodder Lemon was a free application distributed under the
GPL
 licence that allows users to manage their podcasts ? audio and video
programmes
downloaded from the Internet to their MP3 player.
The product supports more than 15 languages and has a built-in directory
with thousands
of podcasts feeds, and will automatically download new podcasts when they
become
available.
Apple's legal team asked the open source group to drop the name of the
software as
it suggested a connection to its flagship iPod device. The developers have
now changed
the name of the product to Juice to avoid legal action.
Scott Grayban, a Juice developer who also works on a similar product called
CastPodder,
rejected Apple's claim that iPodder's name would confuse users.
It's disappointing to see a large company such as Apple go after a small
open source
project, and just shortly after we had over 1 million downloads," Grayban
added.
"In fact, if anything we helped their sales of iPod because that was one of
the MP3
players iPodder could sync to," Grayban told ZDNet UK.
In a Web posting, fellow developer Garth T Kidd said the name change was
inconvenient
but could have been worse.
"Fortunately for us, Apple's lawyers were polite almost to the point of
being apologetic
? and entirely reasonable. It's not appropriate for me to go into the
details of
our arrangement but I can say I don't feel hard done by. Sure I wouldn't
have minded
not having to change our name, but that couldn't really be avoided," he
wrote.
Apple declined to comment for this report.




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