Following last week’s post on Gum (free software for DRM-free media distribution to refresh your memory), I have received some suggestions from various people. One of them was to try and build a community around Gum. So I’ve made a project website for Gum (as it is free software) which lists things to do, access to source code, etc. and I’ve setup a mailing list and IRC channel (#gum on irc.freenode.net). Everyone is welcome to participate. 
I’ll upload whatever source code is done till now to the Subversion repository in the morning tomorrow.
In the past week after the post, I did some database development for the backend. I also contacted Magnatune on the phone and and they have kindly agreed to have their whole catalogue available on Gum under CC licenses (it was free, but I had better ask them before using such a large catalogue, no?). It was a very nice gesture from them, and their data is in various tables now, helping with database testing and query optimizations. A rudimentary web interface is also done for audio items which shows metadata (you can find it if you know where to look 
). More things are in the works.
I re-request help for Gum. If any software company can sponsor salary, hardware and bandwidth, I can work full-time on this project and perhaps get a full-time co-developer or two. There are many items to do. It will definitely rock to have funding. Nokia, Red Hat, Novell, Sun.. are any of you interested? It can’t hurt much to hire one guy to work on DRM-free media distribution software and your desktop/handheld OS gets a nice GTK+ application. Well everyone does.. that’s the beauty of free software.
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