“‘The open source community is the ultimate marketing focus
group,’ says entrepreneur Stephen Street, whose latest venture,
StreetFire Sound Labs, is taking on traditional stereo equipment
manufacturers in the ‘living room war’ over home media equipment.
StreetFire’s first product, the fully open source RBX1600 personal
music server, debuted in the fourth quarter of 2004. The big
difference between StreetFire’s $750 server and proprietary
systems: ‘We want people to hack our box,’ says Street. ‘You know
the people hacking their Tivos and running Linux on their Xboxes?
We love those guys!’“San Francisco-based StreetFire Sound Labs spent the past two
years developing the RBX1600, a MontaVista Linux-powered digital
audio server that allows users to control their music collections
of up to 1,600 CDs from a Linux, Windows, or Macintosh
computer…”