Senuti and iRip

Just last week my good friend had to bring her laptop to be serviced because it was so overburdened by viruses. After it had been fixed she learned that geek squad had to erase her entire iTunes library. Thinking that she had lost all of her purchased music in addition to stressing about how much time it takes to copy every single one of your CDs back into iTunes was really stressing her out. Last year I got a new computer and a new ipod and faced a similar dilemma. I found this great open source software program called Senuti. It was a free download and all I needed to do was download the program and plug my ipod in and it synced by iTunes to my iPod, rather than vice-versa. I told my friend about it and she was so relieved.

Yesterday I was helping her find the program and was disappointed to find that it has gone closed sourced. Now one can use it for thirty days and transfer one thousand songs before he must pay for the service. Many similar programs like iRip are now doing the same thing, but offer even less time and transfers, it, for example is only free for a week and only allows one hundred free song transfers.

My friend was willing to pay for the program simply for its convenience, but before she decided to go ahead and pay I told her to google "senuti free open source." The first hit that came up was a success. Someone created a page and posted the free open sourced download as well as the source code to it (http://wstein.org/senuti/). The creator stated that they felt "betrayed" when senuti went commercial. He goes as far to quote the creator of Senuti as saying: "if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights." This is pretty much the doctrine of free open sourced software.

Senuti and iRip describe themselves as "freeing your iPod." For people who lose their iTunes or get a new computer programs like this are a godsend. Apple does not allow one to copy songs from one's ipod to their computer, and this one can see is for obvious reasons this makes music sharing even easier. If iPods could reverse sync than sharing entire libraries would be so easy it would become the norm further "killing" the music industry.

I cannot decide if I too feel "betrayed" by Senuti and iRip going closed sourced. The download is still easy to find, easy to use, and gives one a free trial. It is still in the spirit of open sourced software since it provides a service that people need for legitimate and illegitimate reasons that Apple restricts. Why shouldn't the programmers make some money of this application?