CNET News: Betting the Farm on Open Source?

“So far, open-source advocates have given RealNetworks’ plans
high marks. And for the most part, analysts have concurred with
Glaser’s interpretation that the corporate open-source failures of
the past have little relevance to his company’s release. But
questions remain: How long can RealNetworks continue selling a
streaming server while Microsoft gives one away for free? To what
extent can the company rely on the market for IP devices? And even
if RealNetworks is in a fundamentally different position than its
superficially similar predecessors, has the company adequately
studied those failures and figured out how to avoid its own…?

“Q: What gave you the idea to release this
code?

“A: We had been talking for a couple of years with some of our
partners because we always ran into this issue of having a partner
that wanted to build to and add on to our platform…Nokia came to
us at the beginning of the year, and they gave us the road map of
the devices they wanted to add Real to. And it was 12 different
devices, and in some cases they had different operating systems.
You could wind up sucking up a whole development organization in
serving one partner. Nokia’s a pretty important partner, with 100
million phones a year, but we thought, ‘Wow, we have to change the
model.’ So with Nokia we created a very flexible paradigm of how we
would share source code and maintain compatibility…”

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