As RealNetworks turns to open source in its battle for the streaming media market, it faces a foe as formidable as Microsoft: history.
Many have compared RealNetworks and its establishment last week of the Helix open-source initiative to Netscape Communications, which in 1998 was the first significant software company to put its proprietary product into open-source development, only to languish.
But among the three major streaming media competitors, Apple Computer was the first to make the leap to open source--a move that also offers something of a cautionary tale for the curative powers of such efforts.
In April 1999, a month after it established the Darwin open-source organization that would give birth to its OS X operating system, Apple revealed the source code to parts of the QuickTime streaming format and invited developers and companies to use and disseminate it.
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