Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com has called out Steve Jobs on Jobs’ recent open letter regarding DRM.
Robertson lays out a four point challenge to Jobs to put his money where his mouth is by:
- Selling content in iTunes in .mp3 format. Robertson confirms, as Jobs pointed out earlier, that not all record companies demand DRM. There are plenty of indie labels that don’t require DRM so why does Apple sell the songs with DRM? Why sell the music in a protected format if the artist doesn’t demand it. Ah-ha! Got ya, Steve. Sounds reasonable to me, this is virutally indefensible.
- Open up the iPod database format to developers. Opening up the iPod database might help developers increase opportunities for consumers to have better software the same way that all open source software has benefit consumers. This is really the whole idea behind open source - more eyes on the problem, more solutions for the end user. I’m not impressed by this as much as selling non-required DRM as .mp3 and there is as much a chance of Apple opening the code to iPod code as there is [insert your favorite impossiblity colloquilism here].
- Open up the iTunes Store code to developers so that more systems could use it. Amen brutha, but guess what, this ain’t happening either. If iTunes worked seemlessly with say . . . Ubuntu, or any other Linux distro, Apple would see a huge drop in OS X users. The exodus of long time Mac users at the higher levels has been well documented but the thing that keeps the common man involved is iTunes. iLife is great, but iTunes is like air for most users.
- Make iTunes for Linux. Uhhh, what I just said, see my response to number 3, Apple would be losing users right and life.
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