- Tuesday, 1 December 2009
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It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
Amazon Linux downloader taking forever
TWO MONTHS ago we praised Amazon.com's DRM-free MP3 music store. However, while the company promised a Linux version of its "MP3 downloader" software strangely enforced to buy full albums, there is not even a public beta of it in sight.
This scribbler repeatedly e-mailed Amazon's PR office asking about a release date and even offering to act as beta-tester of it, and for weeks we heard only a deafening silence, until finally Pete Baltaxe, director of digital music at Amazon.com and whom we imagine as having a robotic voice told the INQUIRER: " Amazon MP3 allows customers to download individual songs if they use Linux. A Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader is under development, and when released will allow entire album purchases." [No italics for quotes please Fernando, Ed.]
Robotic, I say, because Baltaxe's answer is no different from what the firm has been saying since the beta MP3 store was launched: "The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a tiny application that is required for purchasing and downloading an entire album and is currently available for Mac and Windows operating systems. If you use Linux, you can currently buy individual songs. A Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader is under development, and when released will allow entire album purchases."
What is really puzzling is why didn't the firm code -in addition to its original Windows version- a Java version of its "MP3 downloader" to begin with, as it would have allowed it to reach all non-Windows platforms -and even mobile phones- with a single development effort. Java nowadays is not the fugly late-90s experience, and if in doubt take a look at advanced desktop apps like Azureus, Phex, or Art of Illusion as examples. By using Swing and modern Java SE technologies like JDIC it's even possible to effortlessly create applications that dock to the SysTray or Gnome panels, or embed the system browser inside a Java application.
The Java security model is also perfect for these kind of applications. It would have been a great mass deployment of "Java Web Start" which can cache a Java application on the local hard disk eliminating the need of repeat downloads... not to mention a great way to enjoy Amazon's MP3 library from Java-enabled smartphones and PDAs if they also packaged a Java ME (mobile) version.
In short: Where are Sun's Java evangelists when one needs them?. And who is the Chief Technologist at Amazon who decided to do separate Windows, Mac OS-X and now Linux versions?. Are they going to code one version for every mobile OS as well?. This INQuiring mind would like to know.
Amazon offers example Java code for its Amazon Web Services APIs. Surely the MP3 Store software development group knows about this?. We're talking about a tiny application that needs to retrieve a list of files, and then proceed to download one after another, allowing the user to pause and continue downloads. There must be at least half a dozen simple wget GUI interfaces that do that kind of job already. But of course none work for Amazon's service as the details on the file download process haven't been published.
It should be noted that by the time Amazon's MP3 store beta was launched, Windows and Mac OS-X software was immediately available, so it means the software was under development for some time before the announcement date. Is thus such a big task to port an existing GUI and http file retriever for Linux? I bet that in the worst case scenario it would have taken only a couple weeks for hobby programmers to create a working Linux software had Amazon.com released the relevant XML/HTTP specs to folks like the Gnome community -just to name one- and supported the project with a donation. Or how about Ubuntu?. I bet they'd have been interested in sponsoring the development for inclusion of the Amazon MP3 store downloader in its distro.
And the same could be said about a XUL version coded as a Firefox extension. This secretive attitude by the firm is not nice. What are the worries?. After all, all the payment and processing is done securely in the server, and accessed by a secure browser connection, the only work left to do is downloading all files in a batch rather than having the user click one by one. And even in that case what would be the big deal of letting a user click twelve times to retrieve the average tracks on a CD?.
So, Dear Amazon: After doing the right thing and dumping DRM, why not go the extra mile and embrace cross-platform development and the power of open source development communities? µ
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I dislike sites that need "special software" to download files. 

It's perfectly possible to have a web-based login system for secure/paid-for downloads, so why don't these sites do that, obviating the need for any additional development on any platform that has an operational browser.

In fact I dislike such sites so much I input fake user information to them if they ask for it as part of the registration process... Information like address that they don't need if I'm just downloading a file to my computer.
Thanks for that comment, Stephen Brooks.
Fernando, common, there are so many alternatives better than Java (e.g. QT), from which you could find good apps much more stable and diverse than the few buggy ones that you mentioned (Azureus, argh). And, unlike Java, they're fully open-sourced and you as a developer wouldn't need to struggle with something as crappy as Eclipse.
I suspect the reason that Amazon is going the secret route is that the Amazon music servers are trivially simple to hack, and that they don't want the cat to get out of the bag early.

At any rate, if Amazon's security model holds up, there is no downside to releasing the code. It should be trivial to translate their efforts into Java, Qt, Perl, or anything else you can think of (my personal preference is Commodore 64 BASIC, but oh well).

Maybe it's the whole "if we reveal our intellectual property, we won't be able to get a patent on it" boogeyman. Well, bollocks to Amazon. A fanatical Amazon MP3-buying fanboi will be able to reverse the code by wiresharking the process.

I just don't see this as "worth it". It certainly is not as burning an issue as the BBC iPlayer, for instance (doesn't Apple have a copyright on every instance of i[Word]?).

That's a lot of punctuation, at the end.
Amazon is a private company, what the heck you care what platform they use to implement their software. They are not directly obliged to use any particular techonologi but one that suites their needs/interests/tastes etc .... 

You sound in your article like they must choose java .... which is buggy as hell to develop on ... but you probably never do any software so you never got to deal with buggy File implementation, JDialogs etc .... Java is filled with bugs, and any non-trivial bug is never solved; still after 10 years they didn't fixed filefilters on awt ... 

[You're banned Anon. Ed.]