[Flac-dev] Should FLAC join Xiph?

[earldunovant at earthlink.net]

On 21 Nov 2002 at 1:39, Josh Coalson wrote:

> 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 ).

Interesting thead. I think your issues are with software developers. The 
hardware guys are using the decoder, and they have no incentive to 
make do something bizarre that would make it incompatible with what 
the core encoder implementation outputs. But in thinking about the 
software end, I think back to the ARC vs. ZIP. If a particular 
implementation becomes very popular, the author would have plenty of 
incentive to develop extensions to the encoder that might break other 
people's decoder implementations. 

Are file extensions copyrightable? If they are, maybe you can copyright 
the extension for FLAC files to insure that anything claiming to be a 
FLAC file is compatible with the core libraries. Incompatible extentions 
must be called something else.