After Joost Support Team member under the name “Lodewijk” pretty much gave a response that told the Linux community to fsck themselves in regards to a Joost version for the Linux operating system, what could’ve been a regular Forum thread became mainstream today when it hit the digg.com homepage.
Read the response by the Joost Support Team:
Hi,
We’re currently working on improving the performance of the PC and Mac
versions available today.
Although there has been demand for a Linux version of Joost, we have to
prioritize our business objectives. As a result, we do not have plans to
release a Linux version at this time.Kind regards,
Lodewijk
The Joost Support Team.
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but this has turned into a “I rather go to hulu.com” comment party on digg.com, and some users say one thing that is absolutely right:
dazparkourdazparkour
They use linux servers. They use free software.
If they wanted to, they could have drafted in volunteer programmers.
They take from FOSS with one hand and they give us the finger with the other.
Joost could have at least put a subversion repository for open source developers to mess around with the open part of the code and at least give some instructions to run from source in Linux. As a devil’s advocate, yes, they run on XUL, yes they run on FFMpeg (with lots of different codecs probably), but there are portions of their work that are propietary and probably not ported to Linux yet.
Maybe this part of their technology has to do with modified versions of their P2P technology. If you fiddle a little bit with their binaries you’ll see references to Skype libraries (which works in Linux), but they must have done lots of optimizations for video streaming (we’d hope)
In any case, as much as I love Linux, we’re still a “desktop minority” (probably thanks to this same stupid circle of companies not wanting to develop software since we’re a minority) in comparison to the universe of Windows PCs out there. Joost is a company on a tough market, they came in early and they may have a technological advantage over their competitors, they’ll be able to scale for being p2p based, their bandwidth costs will probably a third of hulu’s, for now it will be a game of waiting for their web based version and a much needed redesign on their content navigation and search.
We’ll see if they get another round of funding this year, it’s been over a year since they received $45MM, a hell of a lot more content is available now, there’s a limited number of ads, I certainly don’t hope they’ll pull the plug, p2p tv is one of the ways to go, the product just needs to evolve.