[Flac-dev] Should FLAC join Xiph?

[Josh Coalson]

That is the question I put before you all tonight :)

(Short background, Xiph is the corp behind Vorbis and Ogg,
among other things; see http://xiph.org/about.html .  I
think Emmett is here now so correct any of this if it's
wrong.)

I've been talking a little with Emmett Plant and Monty about
this.  If it were to happen, it would mean the following:

1. FLAC would benefit from the increased visibility from the
association.  Emmett can probably expound more upon this point.
Anyway, hopefully this will mean it's popularity will rise,
not just with users but also with developers of other tools.

2. The core libraries would become BSD-licensed.  I've been really
50/50 on this ever since I submitted the question to Slashdot
(see http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/27/1650256 ).
Now that WMA lossless is out it seems like less of an issue but
I will still need to get permission from some of you, those that
have contributed legally-significant (in the U.S. I think that
means >10 lines of) code to libFLAC.  Only the codec libraries
need to be BSD; the command-line tools and plugins would remain
GPL.

3. Operations would move from Sourceforge to Xiph.  There are
pluses and minuses, actually not so much minuses as unknowns.

These are the main changes that would happen.  So I ask everyone,
especially libFLAC contributors, what do you think?

Josh


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