It is no secret that the competition for global domination in the operating system market has moved from the desktop to the living room couch. Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen has famously said that devices will suck lots of the functionality off of the desktop, and all the major players, from Sony to Hewlett-Packard to Microsoft are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in R & D to occupy the coveted space in front of the couch throne. The Olive Symphony, a Linux-powered hi-fi wi-fi stereo hub, stands a decent chance for a prime position before the living room throne.
You can read a good, brief review of the Olive Symphony here by Tony Smith of The Register. Essentially, the Olive Symphony is a stereo tuner on steroids. It looks like a stereo component, and the user interface functions like a stereo interface, with the typical forward, pause, play, etc buttons; and it also has a dial-within a dial type of knob for moving from song to song, artist to artist, and playlist to playlist. It will take digital and analog feed from a wide variety of other stereo components, and let you easily digitize that feed, if analog, and tack everything onto your digital playlist.
But oh no, Mr. Bill, here comes the Grokster griffin, the beast of the copyright cartel, to inspect the Olive Symphony to see if it passes snuff on DRM!! If the copyright cartel doesn't like the fact that the Olive Symphony lets people burn CDs and then share those CDs on the Internet, will it sue Olive Inc.? Oh no, Mr. Bill, oh nooooo!!!!
During my interview with Olive Inc.'s CEO, the very pragmatic Oliver Bergmann, I was able to see that the whole crew at Olive Inc. must have sat down in a dark room with a bright light and tried to figure out how they could offer a "robust" device that will actually allow Olive customers to make fair use of their music without inviting a lawsuit from the thugs at the RIAA. Turns out, the Olive Inc. crew have made some reasonable to the RIAA thugs. It's not possible to use the Olive Symphony to share audio
files on line. The user simply does not have access to those files, at least not without some tinkering around with the source code.
But it would be inaccurate to call the Olive symphony a closed box. First, there is the CD burner escape-hatch, of course. And perhaps more important, Olive Inc. has also created the support framework for an open community of classical musicians, called the Olive Orchestra, who will be able to digitize music they have created with the Olive Symphony box, and then list their music up on Olive Inc.'s website for free download.
It's easy to see the potentially profound impact of the Olive Symphony's one-two-three-four-five-six punch. First, Olive creates a Linux-powered device that runs an open source operating system. Second, it installs that Linux OS on open source hardware (!!), in the form of the PowerPC by Power.org. (Yep, if you haven't heard of it before [I hadn't], IBM, Novell, and a bunch of other corporate open source backers have started an open source org to govern the trajectory of the PowerPC.) Third, the
Olive Symphony provides its users with an analog loophole by virtue of its ability to receive and send an analog music signal, thereby bypassing DRM altogether. Fourth, it is able to digitize that analog signal, and store the formerly analog music track as a digital file on a CD, as previously mentioned. Fifth, that formerly analog track can be stored and burned as an open standard FLAC file. Finally, and perhaps most stunning for the RIAA thugs, Olive Inc.
creates the Orchestra community to bring together the wisdom and creativity of classical artists from around the world who are interested in releasing their work under a Creative Commons license, namely, the Attribution-ShareAlike license.
It goes without saying that piracy is not the exciting point. Piracy is a nuisance. Even Microsoft's Internet Explorer is free as in beer. There's no excitement in that. The exciting power of the Olive Symphony is its ability to enable sharing of new ripped music licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike license, and the possibility that musicians will actually take Olive Inc. up on its
invitation to the Olive Orchestra. Record labels, like Microsoft, won't go away, but at least the importance of record labels has now been diminished in important ways, so that they will actually have to earn a living, for a change, rather than just gouge artists AND music consumers. The Olive Symphony is one little step in making that happen.
But let it not be said that Olive Inc. or CEO Oliver Bergmann have thumbed their noses at either the RIAA, Microsoft, or other members of the copyright cartel. In his interview, Oliver was very clear that providing a high quality audio experience is the primary focus of Olive Inc., and they are willing to work with copyright holders to make it happen. In the same way that OpenOffice.org, Audacity, the GIMP, PostgreSQL,
and other open source projects have reached broader user bases by being cross-platform, Olive Inc. is hunkering down for a long stretch before a broad audience on the living room throne. Ultimately, most of the users of the Olive Symphony probably won't know that Linux is powering their music, in the same way that most people don't know that Apache is powering their Internet cruises.
But that's okay, because code is law in cyberspace,
to quote Larry Lessig. In the quest for freedom in cyberspace, the battle comes down to six words: install base, install base, install base. With its very high quality sound, its multi-room play functionality, its easy user interface, and Olive Inc. flexible open source based business plan, the Olive Symphony stands a decent chance of gaining a prominent position before the living room throne. The Olive Symphony can be a
good friend to the open source community. Do yourself a favor, take a look at the Olive Symphony, and tell a friend about how it could help us keep cyberspace free. As in freedom.
