[Flac-dev] Should FLAC join Xiph?

[Russell O'Connor]

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[To: flac-dev at lists.sourceforge.net, mcf-general at lists.sourceforge.net]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Drew Hess wrote:

> One case I can think of where a commercial vendor has taken a BSD-licensed
> protocol and twisted it with proprietary changes is Microsoft+Kerberos,
> but if I recall correctly, they eventually caved in to pressure and either
> released their changes or made their implementation compatible with the
> reference implementation.

This is interesting.  I've never though of using copyright to attempt to
prevent embrace and extend ploys by commercial venders.

But in the end, it seems futile.  A big company like Microsoft has enough
resources to reimplement libFLAC should they wish.  Then they can embrace
and extend without worry about copyright.

So I would recommend a Public Domain ``license''.  I really don't
understand why that choice isn't more popular among developers.

- -- 
Russell O'Connor            <http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~roconnor/>
``[Law enforcement officials] suggested that the activists were stopped
not because their names are on the list, but because their names resemble
those of suspected criminals or terrorists.'' -- SFGate.com
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