Category: MetaBrainz

Google pledges $15,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation

I’m extremely pleased to announce that Google has just pledged $15,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation! The goal of this donation is have the foundation pay me a modest paycheck that will allow me to keep focused on managing MusicBrainz and writing more code to move the project forward. Without this support I periodically have to … Continue reading “Google pledges $15,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation”

I’m extremely pleased to announce that Google has just pledged $15,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation!

The goal of this donation is have the foundation pay me a modest paycheck that will allow me to keep focused on managing MusicBrainz and writing more code to move the project forward. Without this support I periodically have to stop working on MusicBrainz projects for a few weeks to earn some money so I can continue to pay my bills. You may have noticed lull periods where I am not very present because contract work demands my time — hopefully we will be done with these periods. This donation will cover me for at least 6 months and by then I hope to have more data licenses sold which would keep the paychecks rolling!

A big fat thank you goes out to Google and Chris DiBona, the Open Source Programs Manager at Google. Thank you so very much for supporting MusicBrainz!

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Service status update and upcoming release

Update: The move was postponed by approx. 24 hours, and has now been started. Its been a rough week for MusicBrainz, that’s for sure. First off, about a week ago a post about MuiscBrainz bubbled to the top of digg.com and that sent masive waves of traffic to us. That died down later in the … Continue reading “Service status update and upcoming release”

Update: The move was postponed by approx. 24 hours, and has now been started.

Its been a rough week for MusicBrainz, that’s for sure. First off, about a week ago a post about MuiscBrainz bubbled to the top of digg.com and that sent masive waves of traffic to us. That died down later in the week until all those people came back on the weekend and overwhelmed the servers. Our puny, but trusted, web server zim is just stretched too thin to handle all the load thrown at it. I apologize for the down-time and random errors you’ve been seeing in the last week.

And all that is about to get worse, but then it should get much better. Today is the day that we’ll attempt to move into the new data center (colocation facility) here in SLO (San Luis Obispo, CA). Starting very shortly after this post we’ll take a stab at moving the site onto new servers that should at least double, if not triple our current capacity to handle traffic.

We expect this move to take nearly three hours, during which you should use our mirror servers (or the staging server) if you need your MusicBrainz fix:

  • http://test.musicbrainz.org
  • http://de.musicbrainz.org
  • http://nl.musicbrainz.org

Last, but not least, we have finally updated the test server with the next release scheduled to be released next sunday on 2006-03-05. This release includes:

  • Many bug reports (see trac for a list of recently closed bugs)
  • WikiDocs: The improved replacement to the first generation wiki documentation system
  • Lucene search: A much improved search facility that is faster and vastly more accurate. This first version will not search for stop words or punctuation — we’ll improve this later.
  • XML Web Service: The newly designed and much more efficient based on XML (not RDF!) goes into beta with this release. This new service is vastly improved over the last one and uses common tools and common best practices for web services. This service alone should improve the performance of our systems. For details see the web service documentation. (We’ll also have new native python bindings to go with these!)

We’ll get a much more detailed ChangeLog out as the week progresses. So, happy playing with the new features while we move the site!

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Colocation move

The move to the new colocation facility at Digital West has started! Yesterday I spent quality time with our new servers moving them into a shared rack. We’ll move the service over to these new servers in the coming few days and then we will move the existing servers into this rack as well. Hopefully … Continue reading “Colocation move”

The move to the new colocation facility at Digital West has started! Yesterday I spent quality time with our new servers moving them into a shared rack. We’ll move the service over to these new servers in the coming few days and then we will move the existing servers into this rack as well. Hopefully ends users won’t see much change at all — we hope to limit our downtime to an hour or so while we copy data to the new servers.

Here are some pictures of the move (before we moved in, the back of the rack and the front of the rack):

before_move_in.jpg

rack_back.jpg

rack_front.jpg

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Server and $1000 donated

Yesterday was another great day for MusicBrainz! We had an anonymous benefactor donate a spiffy Athlon based 1U server with 2GB ram and RAID-1 SCSI drives. Three cheers to anonymous donors! Also, Matthew Mullenweg donated a cool $1000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation. Its not everyday that someone drops such a large donation on this project. … Continue reading “Server and $1000 donated”

Yesterday was another great day for MusicBrainz! We had an anonymous benefactor donate a spiffy Athlon based 1U server with 2GB ram and RAID-1 SCSI drives. Three cheers to anonymous donors!

Also, Matthew Mullenweg donated a cool $1000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation. Its not everyday that someone drops such a large donation on this project. (Hasn’t happened since Derek Sivers did it last year!)

Thank you very much, Matthew and Anonymous Donor!

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Two Dell Poweredge servers donated!

Halsey Minor with Minor Ventures and David Ulevitch of Freedom Networks just donated two Dell Poweredge 1750 servers to the MetaBrainz Foundation! Each of these two 1U servers clocks in with: Dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon processors 2 Gb RAM 2 Ultra 320 36Gb SCSI drives with RAID controller These two machines help us quite a … Continue reading “Two Dell Poweredge servers donated!”

Halsey Minor with Minor Ventures and David Ulevitch of Freedom Networks just donated two Dell Poweredge 1750 servers to the MetaBrainz Foundation! Each of these two 1U servers clocks in with:

  • Dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon processors
  • 2 Gb RAM
  • 2 Ultra 320 36Gb SCSI drives with RAID controller

These two machines help us quite a way toward our current hardware fundraising goal — now we only need to find a beefy database server and we’re ready to migrate into the colocation facility here in SLO.

Thank you so much Halsey and David — the entire MusicBrainz community will love you for your generous donation!

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Introducing: Linkara Musica

I’m immensely pleased to announce the first commercial project built with MusicBrainz data: Linkara Música Linkara is a social networking site similar to Friendster here in the US. However, Linkara goes far beyond what Friendster has done and offers its users to connect on their interests in books, movies, and now music. Users can search … Continue reading “Introducing: Linkara Musica”

I’m immensely pleased to announce the first commercial project built with MusicBrainz data: Linkara Música

Linkara is a social networking site similar to Friendster here in the US. However, Linkara goes far beyond what Friendster has done and offers its users to connect on their interests in books, movies, and now music. Users can search for music/books/movies, rate them and find other people who share similar tastes.

Linkara is based in Barcelona, Spain and caters to the Spanish market — so be ready with your best Spanish skills when you click on the link above. I wanted to thank Tim Towle and the rest of the Linkara team for bearing with MetaBrainz as we worked out the legal contracts necessary to close this deal.

The amazing part of this announcement is that the MusicBrainz/MetaBrainz model works — it is possible to license public domain data! Even more amazing are the vast numbers of users who helped create MusicBrainz and enable Linkara Música. 183,000+ users have in some way or another participated in MusicBrainz and overall managed to not step on each others toes to create a growing database of music metadata. Thanks to everyone who has participated — this would not have happened without you!

P.S. I know that Last.fm has been using the MusicBrainz data for a while now, but we still haven’t entered into a business relationship yet, so it doesn’t count. Yet.

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Web service ToS follow-up

[ Rather than respond to comments to the previous post, I will create a new post — I think this is important enough to clarify ] Declin said: > I don’t see how putting a particular license on the *data* solves the problem. Terms of *service* are something entirely different. We’re not putting a new … Continue reading “Web service ToS follow-up”

[ Rather than respond to comments to the previous post, I will create a new post — I think this is important enough to clarify ]

Declin said:

> I don’t see how putting a particular license on the *data* solves the problem. Terms of *service* are something entirely different.

We’re not putting a new license on our data — the data remains under the existing licenses.

I am suggesting that the ToS for our web service state that:

  1. Anyone can access the web service.
  2. Data returned by the web service is covered under the CC license, since we may return data where portions are PD and portions are CC. We must use the greater common denominator license if we want to be consistent with our data licenses.

This has the effect that anyone can connect to our web service, but using the data returned from the service has to be use in accordance with the CC license. In order to not be in copyright violation, the user needs to qualify as non-commercial set out by the CC license. The two clarifications on non-profit I give serve to make it clear that these uses fall into the non-commercial realm, since the CC license errs on the side of commercial use if a use falls into a grey zone.

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Continue reading “Web service ToS follow-up”

MusicBrainz web service: Time to adopt a Tos?

I recently got word that at least one for-profit company (who shall remain nameless right now) is/was using the MusicBrainz web service in their paid commercial offering. Personally, I don’t think its OK for a for-profit company to be consuming the resources of a non-profit — we make all of our data and software available … Continue reading “MusicBrainz web service: Time to adopt a Tos?”

I recently got word that at least one for-profit company (who shall remain nameless right now) is/was using the MusicBrainz web service in their paid commercial offering. Personally, I don’t think its OK for a for-profit company to be consuming the resources of a non-profit — we make all of our data and software available for companies to download and use for free (as in speech and beer). If someone wants to use our data for their product, they should do it with their own resources.

For the first set version of the Terms of Service, I would like to keep things simple and not add too many rules. Given that I would like to solicit feedback about adopting the following Terms of Service for the web service:

I’d like to get some feedback on this, so please leave a comment:

  • Does this make sense philosophically?
  • Do you spot any problems with this setup?
  • What else should we consider?

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Profit and Loss of the MetaBrainz Foundation for 2005

I just posted the Profit and Loss statement (PDF) for the MetaBrainz Foundation’s fiscal year 2005: Income 4010 Income – Donations – PayPal $ 13,768.31 4020 Income – Donations – General $ 3,980.10 4040 Income – Licenses – Live Data Feed $ 2,465.74 4070 Income – Bank – Interest $ 13.02 4080 Income – Affiliate … Continue reading “Profit and Loss of the MetaBrainz Foundation for 2005”

I just posted the Profit and Loss statement (PDF) for the MetaBrainz Foundation’s fiscal year 2005:

Income
4010 Income – Donations – PayPal $ 13,768.31
4020 Income – Donations – General $ 3,980.10
4040 Income – Licenses – Live Data Feed $ 2,465.74
4070 Income – Bank – Interest $ 13.02
4080 Income – Affiliate – Amazon $ 122.66
   Total Income $ 20,349.83
 
Expense
5020 Expense – Bank – PayPal $ 818.60
5040 Expense – Hosting – CCCP $ 1,174.00
5050 Expense – Rent – Higuera Office $ 2,000.00
5070 Expense – Hardware $ 4,661.47
5080 Expense – Travel $ 802.41
5090 Expense – Internet $ 264.31
5100 Expense – Marketing $ 155.00
5110 Expense – Development $ 2,486.15
5120 Expense – Supplies $ 51.52
5130 Expense – Gifts $ 186.90
5140 Expense – Events $ 355.02
   Total Expense $ 12,955.38
 
   Net Income $ 7,394.45

I’ve also posted the Balance Sheet for 2005 (PDF) and the Balance Sheet for December 2005 (PDF). While we weren’t wildly successful for our first full year in operation, we stayed in the black the entire time and certainly showed that we have a lot of public support. And the IRS cares much about public support for tax exempt non-profits.

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