 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2005 |
| Founder | Jeroen Wijering |
| Headquarters | New York City, New York |
| Website | jwplayer |
JW Player is a New York based company that has developed a video player software of the same name. [1] The player, for embedding videos onto web pages, is used by news, video hosting companies, and for self-hosted web videos. The company has also created the video management software "JW Platform", formerly known as "Bits On The Run". [2]
JW Player was developed in 2005, initially as an open-source project. [2] In December 2015, JW Player stated that their software is no longer offered with an open-source license; instead it is offered with a Creative Commons license for non-commercial use. [3] [4] The software is named after the founder and initial developer Jeroen Wijering. [5] It initially was distributed via Wijering's blog. In about 2007 it was integrated into the advertising company named LongTail, which was renamed after the software in 2013. In 2008 a company, headquartered in New York, was formed which continued to develop and distribute the player. [6]
During the early development, before it was purchased by Google, YouTube videos were streamed by JW Player. [7] [8] In 2015, JW Player was rewritten to reduce size and load time. Version 7 was licensed under the proprietary Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. It had integrated support for HTML video and Flash Video, [9] allowing video to be watched on phones, tablets and computers. That year the company's paying customer base grew by more than 40 percent to 15,000, 60% from the USA. 2.5 million websites used the free edition, playing about a billion videos per month. [9] [10]
In 2016, the company released a new simpler-to-use version of its product, entitled JW Showcase. [8] JW Player continues to be used by many companies, including ESPN, [7] Electronic Arts, and AT&T.
JW Player is proprietary software. There is a basic free of cost version distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-SA) [11] license in which videos are displayed with an overlaid company watermark, and a commercial 'software as a service' version.
JW Player supports MPEG-DASH (only in paid version), Digital rights management (DRM) (in collaboration with Vualto), interactive advertisement, and customization of the interface through Cascading Style Sheets. [9]
The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility.
The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties. The ASF and its projects release their software products under the Apache License. The license is also used by many non-ASF projects.
Source-available software is software released through a source code distribution model that includes arrangements where the source can be viewed, and in some cases modified, but without necessarily meeting the criteria to be called open-source. The licenses associated with the offerings range from allowing code to be viewed for reference to allowing code to be modified and redistributed for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
Share-alike (🄎) is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licenses that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original. Copyleft licenses are free content or free software licenses with a share-alike condition.
A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. Examples include the GNU All-permissive License, MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License and Apache license. As of 2016, the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license.
The commercialization of copylefted works differs from proprietary works. The economic focus tends to be on the commercialization of other scarcities, and complimentary goods rather than the free works themselves. One way to make money with copylefted works is to sell consultancy and support to the users of the work. Generally, financial profit is expected to be much lower in a business model utilising copyleft works only than in a business using proprietary works. Another way is to use the copylefted work as a commodity tool or component to provide a service or product. Android phones, for example, include the Linux kernel, which is copylefted. Unlike business models which commercialize copylefted works only, businesses which deal with proprietary products can make money by exclusive sales, single and transferable ownership, and litigation rights over the work, although some view these methods as monopolistic and unethical, such as those in the Free Software Movement and the Free Culture Movement.
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.
Companies whose business centers on the development of open-source software employ a variety of business models to solve the challenge of making profits from software that is under an open-source license. Each of these business strategies rest on the premise that users of open-source technologies are willing to purchase additional software features under proprietary licenses, or purchase other services or elements of value that complement the open-source software that is core to the business. This additional value can be, but not limited to, enterprise-grade features and up-time guarantees to satisfy business or compliance requirements, performance and efficiency gains by features not yet available in the open source version, legal protection, or professional support/training/consulting that are typical of proprietary software applications.
A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.
Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, and scientific discoveries, and similar approaches have even been applied to certain patents.
The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.
The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. The open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software. The term was coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008.
Meteor, or MeteorJS, is a partly proprietary, mostly free and open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework written using Node.js. Meteor allows for rapid prototyping and produces cross-platform code. The server-side MongoDB program is the only proprietary component of Meteor and is part of the Meteor download bundle. It is possible to use Meteor without using the server-side MongoDB. It uses the Distributed Data Protocol and a publish–subscribe pattern to automatically propagate data changes to clients without requiring the developer to write any synchronization code. On the client, Meteor can be used with any popular front-end JS framework, Vue, React, Svelte, Angular, or Bazel.
VisualOn is a Silicon Valley–based multimedia software company that provides high-definition audio and video entertainment to smartphones, tablets, laptops, connected TVs and other mobile and convergent devices. VisualOn's patented technology is modular and platform-agnostic. VisualOn supports streaming, VOD, mobile TV and other multimedia applications.
Media Source Extensions (MSE) is a W3C specification that allows JavaScript to send byte streams to media codecs within web browsers that support HTML video and audio. Among other possible uses, this allows the implementation of client-side prefetching and buffering code for streaming media entirely in JavaScript. It is compatible with, but should not be confused with, the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) specification, and neither requires the use of the other, although many EME implementations are only capable of decrypting media data provided via MSE.
Pioneer is a free and open source space trading and combat simulator video game inspired by the commercial proprietary Frontier: Elite 2. It is available for Linux, and Microsoft Windows.
Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one.