Apple’s Newest Employee - DVD Jon
You may have wondered why the tit-for-tat battle between Apple and Jon Lech Johansen had gone quiet since DVD Jon last broke Apple iTunes encryption a couple of weeks ago.
Now we have the answer - Apple has poached the Norwegian programmer and made him one of their own.
According to Techtree , Steve Jobs finally lost his patience after Johansen managed to reopen the backdoor into iTunes only 24 hours after Apple thought they had closed the loophole. He reportedly offered an undisclosed (but suitably impressive) sum of money for Johansen to join Apple staff. Whether DVD Jon will actually be doing any work for Apple, or is just being paid to keep out of Jobs’ hair we haven’t yet found out.
DVD Jon had teamed up with a group of programmers to create ‘PyMusique’, an alternative client to iTunes which connected to the iTunes Music Server, but did not add the copy protection to purchased files. Initially Linux and Windows versions were released, but later only the Linux version was updated, after criticism that if the only purpose was to produce a Linux iTunes client, why bother building a Windows application as well.
There’s no news on whether other members of the PyMusique team have signed up for Apple.
Add comment April 1st, 2005