[Flac-dev] Should FLAC join Xiph?

[Josh Coalson]

--- Joshua Haberman <joshua at haberman.com> wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman <mdz at debian.org> wrote:
> > I don't understand...a BSD license grants permission to
> redistribute the
> > software freely; it does not make sense to charge a fee for
> software under
> > this license because once it is given, the purchaser may give
> copies to
> > anyone.
> 
> If a company has paid a large sum of money for a BSD-licensed piece
> of software
> they intend to use commercially, why are they going to give away
> copies for
> free to their competitors?
> 
> Still, using a more restrictive license for companies who wish to
> keep their
> modifications private achieves the same goals without the risk of
> letting
> a BSD-licensed copy go into the wild (assuming you wish to keep it
> GPL).

I guess I should clear up, I'm OK now with going BSD for the codec
libs.  Before this all came up I was planning on doing a BSD
FLAC subset decoder anyway.  And even RMS advised the Xiph guys
to go BSD.  But to go forward I need, at a minimum, the go-ahead
from libFLAC contributors in the AUTHORS file.  At the same it
would be nice if the majority of users were warm and fuzzy too.

As for making money licensing, I never had any intention to
(and still don't).  Nobody but M$/Dolby/Fraunhoffer/etc. can
get away with that.  I wouldn't mind contracting out but a
codec has to be popular before that happens anyway.

Overall the answer to the question has been "yes", especially
after clearing up that FLAC won't be tied only to Ogg.  We'll
see how it goes as the discussion winds out over the next few
days (hopefully no one with a strong opinion is on a long
vacation :)

Josh


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