RealNetworks partners with Novell, Red Hat; GPLs Helix Player

RealNetworks announced this morning that it has formed new relationships with Novell and Red Hat, to complement its existing agreements with Sun and Turbolinux. The agreements call for the distribution vendors to ship the open source Helix Player, or the proprietary RealPlayer with their distributions.

Novell is said to have agreed to ship the proprietary RealPlayer, and make it the default player for RealAudio, RealVideo, Ogg Vorbis and Theora codecs.

Red Hat has agreed to ship the Helix player, and include in its boxed version a coupon that entitles the purchaser to a free copy of RealPlayer from RealNetworks.

Additionally, both Red Hat and Novell have agreed to contribute development resources to help qualify the Helix player on the Linux platform, a process expected to be completed "this summer."

RealPlayer 10 for Linux is built on top of the open source Helix Player being developed within the Helix Community, and includes support for both open source as well as commercial components, ranging from SMIL, MP3 and Flash, to the leading RealAudio and RealVideo media formats. Beta versions of RealPlayer 10 for Linux, as well as the free and open source Helix Player, are available today for free download at https://player.helixcommunity.org/2004/downloads/.

Also today, RealNetworks announced it has added the GNU General Public License (GPL) as a third technology licensing option of the Helix Player. With the addition of the GPL, developers now have three licenses from which to choose for Helix Player:

1. GPL

2. RSPL: RealNetworks Public Source License, like GPL, this is an OSI-Certified open source license. The RPSL license is compatible with other non GPL compatible open source licenses

3. RCSL: RealNetworks Community Source License, unabled develoeprs to build proprietary applications.

Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation approves, evidenced by these words, spoken by Eben Moglen, General Counsel and Director of the Free Software Foundation: "We encourage interested free software developers to learn from, improve and share the Helix Player. Real's understanding of the power of the free software development paradigm and adoption of the complementary commercial license and the GPL license allows both Real and the free software community to benefit from the GPL's 'share and share alike' approach."