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Note: Yes, it has been over a month since my last post. I’m sorry!
You’ve probably noticed how scarce software gets when you want to do something corporations frown on. Maybe you want to extract a character from a game so you can 3D print a figure. Maybe you want to archive a multimedia-laden blog before it disappears. You look for specialized software to perform this task. You find that other people have the same needs, and software does exist, but it has some problems. 1) It’s written for Windows. 2) It’s not on a software forge or even a regular web site. You often find it via a random forum link to a file-sharing site, without assurances that it’s the latest version or even the correct software. 3) It’s not open source. If it doesn’t suit your exact needs, you have no hope of using it.
That’s just a summary of the problems with these tools. Frustration abounds when similar issues arise. You ought to get a throwaway email address so you can sign up for the half a dozen forums that claim to host the software, but won’t let you download it right away. Then you may find that the link you thought was the software was merely a password-protected RAR file containing a text file with instructions on how to visit another site to download the software! Hopefully that link is still active.
Your problems aren’t over once you have the software in hand. Maybe you can run it in WINE. Or you have to get a Windows license and spin up a Windows virtual machine. Once the software starts, and you wait for the author’s ego-gratifying splash screen to end, you could find that it’s limited in some way until you pay some bitcoin. You could live with those limitations, but most other people don’t: you will find a time-honored tradition of cracking this software.
That’s assuming the software is still relevant. Maybe an API has changed, or maybe a file format is slightly incompatible now. The author of the tool could have an update, but good luck finding that. More likely is that the tool has been abandoned. It still promises to solve your problem, so nobody is motivated to replace it, but it can never be fixed due to its proprietary nature.
The whole situation is wasteful and ridiculous. There’s a better way.
At the time, there were other solutions to download videos from YouTube, including a quite popular Greasemonkey script. By pure chance, none of the few I tested were working when I did, so I decided to explore the possibility of creating my own tool. And that is, more or less, how youtube-dl was born. I made it a command-line program so it would be easy to use for me and wrote it in Python because it was easy thanks to its extensive standard library, with the nice side effect that it would be platform independent.
(WWW) Origins of the youtube-dl project
Take a look at how rg3 (Ricardo Garcia) created youtube-dl. Did he put a shareware trial on RapidShare? No. Did he make a proprietary Windows tool that would be useless as soon as YouTube changed their API? Nope! He created an open source tool, hosted on a popular software forge. It was easy to run on your operating system of choice. It was easy to get updates and easy for users to suggest fixes. The software blossomed into a video-downloading powerhouse.
The typical utilities that are littered across file-sharing sites have their champions. They are a big deal, but only in their corner of the web. youtube-dl could have been like that, but the open source community made it into a big deal, full stop.
So I beg the authors of these small utilities: be like youtube-dl. It’s better for us and better for you. Nobody’s getting rich from these tools. The customers are extremely price-sensitive. So join us in the gift economy. Instead of creating a tool and moving on, be the founder of your software tool and share it openly. Pass the torch to a successor when it suits you. Instead of being the author of an obscure proprietary tool that is abandoned and forgotten, be the creator of a useful tool whose community ensures its longevity.
20 December 2020 by Sardonyx
Updated 20 December 2020
File under: opinion
File under: open source
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