Sylvain Zimmer

I registered LesAutres.org March 21st last year. I think this was close to the beginning of the jamendo project (I had had the idea a few days before). What a strange path we’ve followed over one year.

A little jamendo history… LesAutres.org was the name of the non-profit I created with a few nice friends to promote free music. All the primary ideas were already there : P2P, CC, complete albums, etc… We had written a “manifesto” and I knew the project had the potential of becoming something huge (I still do :p).

A few months passed, I wrote about 40% of the current website. But I quickly realized the project wasn’t growing fast enough. We attended the first Both concert, had about 7/8 albums on the website, but that wasn’t good enough. So I decided to split the non-profit and the website. During July/August I went to Luxembourg as usual to work at Neofacto, and started convincing Laurent and Pierre to fund the project.

It all went great, and after many name changes (LesAutres.org => Altitune.org => PeerMajor.org => PeerMajor (.com) ), we ended up on “jamendo”, thanks to a bunch of marketing brainstormings with the damn cool Matthew Duder. We founded the company, PeerMajor. Registered the jamendo trademark.

I also rewrote the iRATE server code and protocol during the holidays, because the ratings were obvisouly going to be very important in jamendo.

Since this March 21st I can’t remember a single day I didn’t worked on jamendo :) The last 5 months have been particularly exhausting because I also had tons of work to do at school. Of course school has always been only my second priority until now. But after all this great work I have to focus for a couple of months on my exams, which are very important if I want to enter a CS & Applied Maths school in Grenoble.

So I won’t work on jamendo anymore until mid-May, maybe I’ll do little patches when needed because there’s really pieces of the code which I’m the only one to understand (and that’s not good but when I’ll have time, I’ll clean up… it’s only 3 to 5% of the code..). If I had kept the non-profit I’m pretty sure the project would be dead during this 2 monthes but now I trust Laurent, Pierre and David to do great work !

Yesterday was a day in history (again…) : we founded the non-profit called Luxcommons , to bring Creative Commons licenses in Luxembourg. Actually I’m not an official member yet but that won’t last…. Luxcommons will focus on the adaptation of the licenses to Luxembourg’s law, agreed by Creative Commons.

I hope there will be exciting new developments of CC content here in Luxembourg. We’re already working hard at converting local bands with jamendo !

On the picture, Olivier, Patrick, Laurent … and me :)

Today our main server in Luxembourg was hacked by a crew of idiots… They did such lame things like “rm *log*” or replace all the .php files by a nonsense message.

We’re working to get all the websites including jamendo back online, with increased security of course… We’ll also try to check our logs to see what vulnerability they used to enter.

Too bad for them, we don’t store credit card info nor critical data ! Maybe we’re going to do it in the near future, so let’s take this attack as a warning :)

Yesterday I went to the MDE in Metz’s university. This is where we are going to host the first jamendo concert, and first public testing of ccLive.

The place isn’t really suited for concerts. It’s pretty small, max 200 people. Let’s stick to 200 people for the first one, and we’ll see later if we can grow bigger. Moreover there aren’t other intermediate size venues in Metz. Next time we’ll have to do it in Nancy or Luxembourg.

Here’s the full gallery.

The new album of Spock’s Beard is out ! Time for a quick review…

The first listening left me quite disapointed. It’s very prog, so you can’t really say anything except “wow … too much” the first day :)

I’ve had to time to listen to it more extensively now, and all I can say is that I love it ! The style of previous one (the first with the new line-up without the giant Neal Morse) is definitely extended here. There’s no track I love as much as “The Bottom Line”, but “The ballet of the impact”, “NWC” and “Of the beauty of it all” are hits for sure !

Well, hits… I doubt they’ll be featured on national radio one day, but that’s not where prog lovers belong, right ?

I’m trying to convince a few friends and Adeline (my lovely girlfriend :) to come with me see them live in Beligum next month. The problem is that they use to listen only to the first few seconds of each track… They don’t know what they’d miss if they skipped “The bottom line” just because of the opening riff !!