Ajax Girl

Israeli startup TuneWiki delivers user generated song lyrics to music playing on a PC or mobile device.

The service, which was launched in December 2007, became a hit with “hundreds of thousands” of downloads to jailbroken iPhones alone (says our source), despite the very sketchy nature of the main website and the fact that only hacked iPhones can use the app.

Why is TuneWiki so popular? The video at the end of the post shows how it synchronizes lyrics (karaoke style) to music playing on the iPhone.

A source tells us that the startup has raised an initial round of financing from Benchmark Capital’s Israel fund. General Partner Michael Eisenberg joined the board of directors. We’re still trying to track down the size of the round, and if there were any other investors.

Song Lyrics are still relatively hard to find legally on the Internet. Last year Yahoo began publishing lyrics for hundreds of thousands of songs in image format (to reduce copying and scraping, through a partnership with Gracenote.

TuneWiki as a legal song lyric wiki alone is an interesting site (they recently announced that Universal Music is permitting usage). The syncing software can turn it into a real business. Look for it to take off when official third party applications on the iPhone are released this summer. For now, though, the hacked application is one of the feature applications on the iPhone installer.

TuneWiki was founded by serial entrepreneurs and former Israeli fighter pilots Amnon Sarig and Rani Cohen.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/278702359/

OpenEXT is here. It is a fork of Ext JS 2.0.2, which was under an LGPL license (kinda…. with some invalid, non-open source licensing).

The crux of the fork is:

Ext are claiming that a fork of the existing 2.0 version is not legal, due to the way they applied the LGPL. This is likely to be incorrect, and if correct then their use of the name LGPL was grossly misleading.

At this point, the walls are crumbling, and Jack needs to make a big effort and come clean to his community to save the reputation of the project. If not, it will probably always be in a cloud of darkness as people are both confused and wonder about motives. This is not about personal attacks, but due to not having clarity on the core issues.

You will notice that most of the detractors are members of the Ext community. They aren’t out to spoil some of the work that they themselves put into the project. You see the opposite in fact when you read posts such as this one from Jason Sankey:

The saddest part about this is that the Ext team really have built a fantastic library, and a vibrant community around it. The library had all the hallmarks of an open source success story. Now, however, Ext have committed the cardinal sin of an open source project: they have undermined the trust of their own community.

There are others too.

I actually believe that Jack has been given really poor legal advice, which hasn’t helped his thinking on the issue. It has thus spiraled out of control, and needs a big humble gesture to steer things in the other direction.

If I were Jack, I would call a meeting (phone, irc, whatever) and get all of the parties together. Hash it out with an open mind, and end up with the right answer. Again, this is for the sake of the Ext JS community, customers, as well as the entire open source JavaScript community. If this doesn’t happen, you are keeping the cloud around the project, and handing contributors to other projects. No-one wants to see this happen.

In my opinion the way to protect your business and the project, isn’t through a license to protect the forking. If you have a healthy strong community, any fork by someone wouldn’t put much of a dent in you… as who would go with BobsExt when they can get the real deal. Of course, the reverse is also true, and tearing the community apart will lead to a world where you will never find the true potential.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/278662830/openext-the-fork